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I’ve been hunting for an ecommerce plugin for Wordpress at the request of a client, and so far it appears that the WP e-Commerce plugin by Instinct Entertainment is the only horse in town. I’m bookmarking to give it a good test later. There appears to be a “free” and “commercial” version. I listed the “recently added features” (as of WP e-Commerce 3.5.1) below. The paid version is WP e-Commerce Gold which is a reasonably priced $15 for “a single Blogger”. However, i’m not sure what the $250 “Gold Upgrade - For Business” is exactly for outside of “Businesses setting up WP e-Commerce sites for their clients”. For $250, it better be an unlimited (or close to it) license.

Recently added Features

* New - Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks (latest RC)
* New - Marketing options under shop options (latest RC)
* New - Members Only Module
* Customizable pagination for product listing
* Unlimited products & categories
* AJAX powered Sliding Shoping Cart
* Shop front highlighting for newly added products
* AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop - additional gold module
* Grid View - additional gold module
* Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
* Purchase history for logged in users
* New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
* Chinese Language file
* Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
* Downloadable CSV files
* Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
* Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
* PayPal IPN
* URL linking to products and images
* – Next version
* RSS product feed widget
* Google Cart

Having followed the progress of a fair few WP sites, some thoughts on the subject of SEO for WordPress.

It shouldn’t really be simpler - at the time of writing, for the ’standard blog’ - whatever that might mean - the default WordPress install works just fine. This could change, either on the WordPress side, or by any popular search engine radically changing the way they do things, but not so likely…

You can get into more of a mess by messing with the default, than leaving well alone.

However, there can be exceptions. If you have a lot of archive urls (monthly or category) without many posts in them, a certain large search engine will occasionally index the archive urls and ignore the individual post urls. This is rare, but to get round this, look no further than the WordPress duplicate content cure plugin - it’s been around for a while and does exactly what it claims.

The other cure is the use of the ‘more’ tag to create post excerpts. Here, this will have the effect of breaking up the duplication of content on the archive versus individual post urls - including the index page - exactly what it’s designed for…

Otherwise, all the standard principles apply:-

Use accurate keywords in the post title - don’t be seduced by long-tail keyword theory and start trying to do all this in the title - more likely, it will happen of itself.

Give images their alt tags, especially if they’re linking somewhere.

Think about anchor text in your internal linking, ie from one post to another - can never do any harm to highlight a relevant keyphrase.

There’s other principles involved - consult any reputable SEO guide, not just those focused on WordPress - but, seriously, people often waste too much time trying to make things beyond perfect….

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