I've used the StudioPress wordpress theme, it's one of my favorites, and the best part is that it's free! It has an excellent color scheme, has a clean Web 2.0 look, overall, I just love it.
As with most other Wordpress blogs that I’ve installed, I added Headspace , XML Sitemap generator and many other useful Wordpress SEO plugins. I have written earlier about my Wordpress blog SEO techniques that have worked great so far - including achieving a page rank 3 within 20 days of site launch for one of my blogs.
Studiopress was awesome, except that it gave me one major problem. It wouldn't change the Home Page Title. The home page title defaults to the Site Name- Site Decription format. If you know anything at all about SEO, you’d know that that’s a serious no-no. You want your home page’s title to be keyword rich, to include synonyms and include terms closely related to your site that your visitors are searching for. Your home page title is arguably THE most important SEO factor for your website. Of course, bad content and a great title is not going to help a lot, I am assuming that the basics of a website (good content, fast load speed, clean look and feel) are met.
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/yahoo-store-as-an-seo-friendly-ecommerce-platform
Like many web developers and SEO's, I've always been on the lookout for the perfect Ecommerce platform. CRELoaded is literally LOADED with ecommerce functionality but does not integrate a CMS into it, an unbelievable deficiency in the Web 2.0 world where content is king. Joomla and Virtuemart looked promising but with Joomla sites, you end up spending a lot of time trying a gazillion plugins (components, modules, mambots) that you need to mix and match to make a great site. And then there comes the upgrade and you never know which ones are going to work and which ones will not. And then you also don't know which of your components are supported by the Joomla third party SEO products such as sh404sef or OpenSEF. These plugins are free but often don't support certain components. You need a good Joomla developer that takes the time to keep themselves abreast of the latest in the Joomla and Virtuemart world. Virtuemart is also sort of limited in some key functionality. For instance, it does not integrate an affiliate management feature (there are workarounds, but there you go, more plugins) and does not have recursive billing options built in. These are core features that several stores need.
So, as my hunt for the perfect Ecommerce software continued, I ran into this post, a recent August 2008 post - http://wordpresswebpro.com/seo-tips/yahoo-store-the-best-e-commerce-platform-for-seo/. I am working on a site that is built on Yahoo Store now and I am realizing why this guy is so excited about it. It is pretty good. I am still pretty new to it so I don't know enough about the pros and cons, but it does look promising based on what I've seen so far.
With all the speculation about Microsoft buying Yahoo and even talks about Yahoo not doing so well, I hope Yahoo keeps making it's Store offering better!
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/is-seo-spam
I remember having a heated debate with a friend that works at Yahoo Search about whether SEO involves spamming the search engines for links and whether all SEO's are spammers. He seemed to be a right-wing conservative on this matter, understandable, considering his job every day is to come up with ways to make seach better and SEO's skewing results makes it harder for him. I've given this a lot of thought and I've come to the conclusion that, if done right, it's not. The focus should be on making sure that's value addition to the Internet all along the way.
Testimony to this is that even Yahoo, in their web hosting packages, has entire sections dedicated to SEO, and in fact, has a blog dedicated to that as well...http://ystoreblog.com/blog/category/seosem/. So I guess seo is not really spamming afterall. Finding creative ways to get links is not a bad thing then...it's just marketing. Spamming is bad though, and we all agree on that. The line is gray and it will remain that way until some of the geniuses at the Search Engine companies figure out a way to truly differentiate good content from bad, and start giving less importance to links and more to quality unique content.
There are some very good posts on this topic. I've read many over the years and I am going to list them as I run into more on this topic..
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