Which Blog Extension is the best for a Magento E-commerce Site?

[DoitWiser]

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!!

[Tolod]

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

[TSCHWIL]

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?

[PeterAlexLeigh]

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!

[BlueprintMarketing]

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

[BlueprintMarketing]

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

[Francisco_Meza]

Awesome! Let me know how it goes.

[DoitWiser]

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!

[Francisco_Meza]

I have never used Aheadworks. As far as I know, it's a pretty reputable company that makes many Magento plugins.

[BlueprintMarketing]

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

[Francisco_Meza]

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.

[BlueprintMarketing]

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.

[BlueprintMarketing]

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://yoast.com/cat/magento/

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.

[Francisco_Meza]

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.

[BlueprintMarketing]

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://yoast.com/cat/magento/

http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

http://www.woothemes.com/2012/09/every-line-of-code-audited/

1. 1 Basic technical optimization

   1. 1.1 General Configuration
      1. 1.1.1 WWW vs non-WWW
   2. 1.2 Header Settings
   3. 1.3 CMS Pages
   4. 1.4 Category optimization
   5. 1.5 Products optimization

2. 2 Magento Template Optimization

   1. 2.1 Optimized Blank Template
   2. 2.2 Headings
   3. 2.3 Clean up your code
   4. 2.4 Aim for speed

3. 3 Advanced Magento SEO and Duplicate Content

4. 3.1 Noindex, follow for non-content pages

5. 3.2 Nofollowing unnecessary links

6. 3.3 Canonical URLs

7. 3.4 XML Sitemaps

http://yoast.com/landing-pages-module-magento/

Categories

• Analytics

• Magento

• Offtopic

• SEO

• Serverside

• [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.")

• Usability & Conversion

• Webdesign & development

• [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.")

[Francisco_Meza]

Here you go!

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/customer-experience/blog-tools/wordpress-integration.html

[BlueprintMarketing]

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