The team over at Instinct has been working away on the latest public release of WP e-Commerce and they set WP e-Commerce 2.6.10 free on Thursday.  I was booked up on Thursday, skied Friday and so I am just now getting around to writing about it.  Here are my thoughts.This release fixed and tweaked quite a few things.   Some are visible and some invisible.  With this release we shouldn’t have to see anymore questions in the forums on why the pagnation isn’t working, because now it does.  For those of us in the US the tax options have been improved as has the UPS amdin ui which got some additional options.

The things that I am most excited about, however, are those that impact the carts performance in the search engines:

Call to “db_version” fixed so that it does not cause fatal errors in older versions of wordpress:  Update to this version and no longer should you see your site being indexed for a fatal error.

A number of unneeded SQL queries have been removed and code has been cleaned up:  One big frustration for me has been the slowness of page loading.  This is a known negative factor for seo.  A slow load time negatively impacts your quality score in Adwords which means lower placements and higher costs for your Adwords campaigns.   My hope is that they will continue to reduce the number of queries.  The faster they make this the better.

They also worked on the ping function.  Imagine a shopping cart that tells the search engines when you’ve added a product.  You must admit that’s a nice feature.

The addition of the Meta data that you can add is good, but could be so much more than it is.  If your familiar with HeadSpace2, or the All in One SEO Pack you now they allow you to set custom title tags and meta descriptions per page and on a category basis.  This is what we need the Advanced Options Meta Data to do in WP e-Commerce.  Currently when you input data into the Advanced Options Custom Meta  this is how it is output to a search engine:

<div class=’custom_meta’>
<strong>Pen Recorder:</strong> Record with your pen <br />
</div>

It’s part of the body text.  For SEO what we need it to do is replace the title tag <title>Your Website:  Your Page Title</title>  and of course we need to be able to set this on categories (groups) as well as individual pages.  The same is true for the Meta Description.  This controls the snippet, as Google likes to call it, which is what users see when they see search results.  Controlling your title tag and your snippet allows you to write your results to maximize your clickthroughs from natural search by following the same principals that you would in writing an ad for Adwords.  At a category level this would make it so the  default Your “Website: Products Page” which is truly horrendous could be written to be meaningful.  Right now there’s none on product pages leaving the search engines to grab a snippet they think is meaningful from you page, but which may be totally irrelevant.

Dan is nice enough to ask my opinion from time to time on SEO so if you have other suggestions for SEO improvements please let me know and I’ll pass them on.

In the meantime, to see the entire list of upgrades, there are a lot, head over to http://www.instinct.co.nz/wp-e-commerce-plugin-3610/

P.S.

I’ll be updating the WP e-commerce SEO Manual

p.p.s

You can now get the updated version of our WP e-Commerce SEO Manual.

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