Which Blog Extension is the best for a Magento E-commerce Site?
-
Hello,
We have developed our e-commerce site in Magento and we are launching our own blog.
Currently we are using an aheadWorks blog extension, but I was wondering if it is better for SEO to use a Wordpress extension.
What do you think?
Thank you!!
-
Wordpress is the most vulnerable platforms that can be easily hacked info. If you connect your magento store to wordpress via fishpig or any other extension its only a matter of time before your store gets hacked. BEWARE
-
We used Wordpress for our Magento blog but the issue is a difference in static and dynamic pages. The Wordpress blog, because of the time stamps, took priority over our website and product pages. We had to remove the wordpress and create pages/categories manually. We lost a TON of ranking when we added a wordpress blog to our Magento website.
Is there an SEO friendly way around having the blog rank hiring than the website and products?
-
Hi Alejandro,
I was wondering how you got on with this?
I'm currently looking at moving a client away from the Magneto AhedWorks blog extension as the SEO functionality seems very lacking.
I'm looking at the wordpress integration.
Did it work out for you?
Thanks!
-
I don't know if this is something you're interested or not in but I thought I would let you know. The company that offers the extension also offers these two services I posted below. I would imagine it would only be common sense that you would want your blog to match the rest of your site. As WordPress is still installed as a template you can of course customize the template to whatever look or feel you want it to have. I don't know if this is something that you want to do on your own or if it's something that you'd be interested in taking advantage of at the time of purchase here. However I thought I might just make you aware of it and hopefully be of some help.
UPDATE TEMPLATES TO MATCH YOUR THEME IN WORDPRESS INTEGRATION
Update Templates to Match Your Theme in WordPress Integration
Most Magento eCommerce themes extend the default Magento theme but some sites have bespoke templates that don't quite match. When this happens, your newly integrated WordPress blog might not look as good as you had hoped. If this is the case, we can update the blog templates to match your custom HTML syntax. This will make your blog inherit your Magento styles and look as good as your Magento eCommerce website.
http://fishpig.co.uk/wordpress-integration-update-templates-to-match-your-theme.html
ADD RECENT POSTS BLOCK FOR WORDPRESS INTEGRATION
Add Recent Posts Block for WordPress Integration
One of the great benefits of WordPress Integration is the SEO benefits it offers your Magento eCommerce site. By adding a recent posts block to your website, you will keep your content fresh and updated, which means Google will keep coming back more often!
This service is perfect for Magento store owners who want a nice looking recent posts block adding to their Magento site quickly and without any hassle!
http://fishpig.co.uk/wordpress-integration-add-recent-posts-block.html
-
I second what Francisco said. Please let us know how it goes and good luck to you. Sincerely,
Thomas
PS When you get the answer from somebody like Francisco did In the very first reply to this to you it's a customary to give a thumbs up to that person. Just let you know not trying to force anything. So I would give a thumbs up to Francisco
-
Awesome! Let me know how it goes.
-
Thanks for your help Thomas and Francisco,
Just to clarify, we are not trying to change our e-commerce platform, we just want an extension for a blog within Magento.
I think we will try with the wordpress extension you shared in the first link.
Thanks again for the information!
-
I have never used Aheadworks. As far as I know, it's a pretty reputable company that makes many Magento plugins.
-
Hi Francisco,
Have you ever used the Aheadworks blog? I have seen it run but I was not impressed. However I think we're both in agreement that in this case because he's running Maghneto already as the main framework that he's better off to use WordPress just for the blog itself. Over the other
"aheadWorks blog"
PS
I've been lucky then. I use DynECT for transactional emails on WordPress and I suggested for any Wordpress website. Just because even if you have no contact list it's smart to run a SMTP server off of your website you really don't want to mix those A record IP and email IP addresses if you can help it. with the cost of sending transactional email being so little it is well worth it I think it depends on the host as well. I don't mean to get off topic at all however I am all these things have to do with the best practices for e-commerce. Which I think we both agreed transactional email is definitely a must. On with the ability to have a large amount of customers on the site at a time processing that's on the framwork payment gate & where the host has to be great in but using Maghneto I do strongly recommend hosting provider like fire host
-
I would probably take it one step further and say to use Magneto if you have or expect higher volume sales. Even if a magento site has 10 products, but there are 100 sales per day, it's better than WP.
I use WP everyday as well as Magneto. But we are getting off topic now.
-
Hi Francisco,
I just responded to this. I apologize, and I did it in advance actually. I know it was my mistake I got a 404 probably didn't copy the entire URL. You are correct I was wrong.
To be honest if you are talking about a very large website I agree with you if you're talking about a medium or smaller I would go WordPress woo commerce is an outstanding plug-in and everyone has there opinions mine is simply different.
-
Francisco, thumbs up you've got it I'm sorry I had written buddy that that was a 404 for some reason I clicked on it twice, and it did not function and now it does so I apologize. wanted to say bravo and I hope that these guys have a good look at
http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/
http://www.johnon.com/493/magento-seo.html
I'm sure you guys understand that the speed of your site is directly related to your conversion ratio with e-commerce. Therefore Nginx is much better than Apache-based servers use
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/FOOMAN/extension/457/fooman-speedster
Why the link below explains
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/38134
if you guys don't have an extremely extremely large site I would use WordPress every day of the week.
-
I just checked the link. It works.
WordPress = Static Site/BLog
Magento = eCommerce.
I don't think anyone should be running an ecommerce site using WP, ESPECIALLY if they are doing high volume. Magento is built for ecommerce. Wordpress isn't. You have to find a plugin.
Ecommerce involves transactional emails, tracking numbers, customer accounts, repeat orders, and way more. WP is okay for only a few products.
-
You need to talk to yoast
yoast.comI hope you understand my Magento has no search engine optimization functions built-in.
I would read everything in the links below end make your decision.
Yoast Has done a fantastic job of building the best SEO plug-in for WordPress he has also built a plug-in and more for Magento it is the URL right below. I want to tell you I think in today's age depending on your size of your site you are nuts to run Magento compared to woocommerce build on WordPress as you will read depending on your needs and your site which I don't know you most likely would be much better off search engine wise with a WordPress-based site then Magento
http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
http://yoast.com/synthesis-managed-wordpress-hosting/
Francisco,
I tried your link, and I got an 404 it could be something I did that's a mistake. Because I know you know your stuff. However I came across this way to integrate WordPress into Magento so I thought it could not hurt to have a backup in case the site did not work for them
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/wordpress-integration.html
Then
http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/
&
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
http://www.woothemes.com/2012/09/every-line-of-code-audited/
http://yoast.com/landing-pages-module-magento/
Categories
-
[Social Media](http://yoast.com/cat/social-media/ "At Yoast we're constantly experimenting with the bigger social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. We discuss those experiments here and tell you how to best optimize your site for sharing in the several networks. As this often impacts SEO as well, we'll often discuss the intersect.
One of the things that a lot of social networks require is a set of specific meta tags and headers, so you'll find that a lot of the posts below discuss those.")
-
[WordPress](http://yoast.com/cat/wordpress/ "This blog is based on WordPress, and customizing and SEO-ing it is a constant process, so we blog about that quite often. After all, good SEO on this blog makes for lots of visitors, which is exactly what we want of course.
We're also huge fans of Genesis here, so you'll find that more and more of our WordPress theme related posts have a Genesis component.")
-
-
I am a huge supporter of WordPress. For SEO it is better then aheadworks everyday In my opinion it is the best blogging platform and web platform made. However there are people that just with my personal opinion but I do know that Matt Cutts agrees that WordPress is good for search engine optimization works good for the Google bot. You really should use a WordPress blog if you've Have already developed the site over anything else on the market because WordPress is free it has tens of thousands of free plug-ins somewhere paid obviously the only thing I would recommend is that you take into account the fact that WordPress has a database and is best served up on a managed WordPress host but obviously you're using Magento e-commerce so I imagine you know the importance of high quality hosting. Maybe take a managed Wordpress host WPengine, Zippykid, Pagely, web synthesis to host the blog they will be worth the cost every time or use a outstanding host look at somebody like firehost, Pair, someone great bluebox.net use a CDN AND BLOG OFTEN.
If I can be of any more assistance let me know. I can strongly recommend high-quality fast hosting for anything that is e-commerce so it should fit nicely in with your WordPress setup and you will love the ability to post so easily and rank well. I would say WordPress is #1 all the way sincerely, Thomas
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What are the best practices for microdata?
Not too long ago, Dublin Core was all the rage. Then Open Graph data exploded, and Schema seems to be highly regarded. In a best-case scenario, on a site that's already got the basics like good content, clean URLs, rich and useful page titles and meta descriptions, well-named and alt-tagged images and document outlines, what are today's best practices for microdata? Should Open Graph information be added? Should the old Dublin Core be resurrected? I'm trying to find a way to keep markup light and minimal, but include enough microdata for crawlers to get a better sense of the content and its relationships to other subdomains and sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebElaine0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution? - 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post - And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HireSpace0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Best practice?
Hi there, I have recently written an article which I have posted on an online newspaper website. I want to use this article and put it on my blog also, the reason the article will be placed on my blog is to drive users from my email marketing activities. Would it simply be best practice to disallow Google from crawling this page? or put a rel canonical on the article placed on my blog pointing to the article placed on the online newspaper website? Thanks for any suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Does the blog comments work?
Hi there, I have some keywords which varies difficulty from 1% -30 % . I can rank my urls with some blog comments from high pr blog pages? Is any way to rank them all fast? I am looking for the most cheap and easy way to rank them. One article of 1000 words lets say and some 200-300 blog comments are enough? Site is new, ranks for some other small keywords already.Has zero backlinks almost. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
How to best utilize network of 50 sites to increase traffic on main site
Hey All, First off I wanna thank everyone who has responded to all my previous questions! Love to see a community that is so willing to help those who are learning the ropes! Anyways back to my point. We have a main site that is a PR 3 and our main focal point for lead generation. We recently acquired 50 additional sites (all with a PR of 1-3) that we would like to use as our own little back linking campaign with. All the domains are completely relevant to our main site as well as specific pages within our main site. I know that reciprocal links will get me no where and that google is quickly on to the attempted 3 way link exchange. My question is how do I best link these 50 sites to not only maintain there own integrity and PR but also assist our main site. Thanks All!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0