Blog: General

eBlox is currently in the testing phase of an important upgrade for our storeBlox e-commerce platform customers: Keyword-optimized URLs. What the heck is that? Well, a keyword optimized URL is structured in such a way that the product keywords are actually part of the URL itself. Here’s a comparison:

Standard URL:
http://storeblox2.eblox.com/product.jsp?id=6329

Optimized URL:
http://storeblox2.eblox.com/pl/Ace-Sport-Shoe-Bag/6329

As you can see, the latter URL contains keywords, which benefits the page in search engine relevance. Best of all, these URLs are generated automatically based on product names, so there’s no effort required to implement them.

eBlox continues to develop and deploy best-practice technologies for SEO and e-commerce, and we’ll be rolling this upgrade out free of charge to all customers over the coming month.

Categories: General

One of my favorite “hybrid” web services, Jott, has come out of beta. This is good and bad news – good because the service is very mature and stable, bad because you now have to start paying (just a little bit) for it. For those of you who haven’t tried Jott, it’s essentially a speech-to-text service that allows you to call in notes, messages, to-dos and reminders to a phone number. Jott then transcribes the voice message and sends it to you (or a variety of other services, like your online calendar). It’s a great service when you can’t type a message – for instance, when you’re driving – and the transcriptions are almost always accurate. I use it almost every day, and I recommend you try it out if you spend any substantial time thinking away from a keyboard.

Categories: General

Adobe announced today that they are providing a method for the major search engines to index Flash content. eBlox has always recommended against extensive use of Flash for your site if you wish to be properly indexed and garner good search rankings. It looks like at least part of that problem is solved. We still recommend against using Flash for information-rich sites like e-commerce (it’s just too expensive to duplicate all that content for non-Flash users like mobile users) but for those of you with other sites that have mainly brochure-style content, this new method of crawling Flash sites might benefit you. Read a full writeup at TechCrunch here.

Categories: General