Demistifying Search Engine Experts

With each passing year I fear Search Engine “Experts” more and more. I rank them as modern snake oil sales*, at best. Typically a project brings in an “Expert” who has the personality of gum stuck to my shoe and siphons money from my employers riding on the results of others and contributing little.

* Large enterprise SEO not withstanding. I am talking about the various fly-by-night SEO companies who come in using destructive methods to get fast results at the expense of the small business.

In this post I want to discuss how search engines work and why I advocate against using SEO “experts” until a site is live for 6-12 months minimum with a rich collection of valid content.

Assumption : You have a web programmer and coder like me who will write solid code, coach the staff, and encourage good work.

Meta Tags & Description :

Truth : Not too valuable. Estimated at 5% of overall ranking calculation
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Apple OSX

I use a Mac.

The OS(X) is just a nightmare with only a few exceptions.

This is not one of the exceptions.

The Problem: In learning C++ (C Plus Plus) and want to compile and execute some simple programs – math and text manipulation mostly.
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Remote Access via SOAP in Magento – the short version

Keeping it short. After I got (c)Rackspace to turn on SOAP I had to step back for a while, those tech support issued wear me down. I could have turned it on myself, but we have a full service contract.

Now I am left with mostly 500 errors, occasional 404 (mod_rewrite was dropping page not found error).
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Get Tracking Information from Magento via Order Number

I work in Magento frequently. Here’s a pretty straight forward query to get the core shipping information out of  in Magento for  v 1.4.1 (will not work pre 1.4x as all the tables changed – no really, thanks)

select  shp.number, shp.title, shp.carrier_code, shp.updated_at, flt.shipping_description
 from `magento_store`.`sales_flat_order` as flt
 left join `magento_store`.`sales_flat_shipment_track` as shp
 on (flt.entity_id = shp.order_id)
 where flt.increment_id = '$order_id';

I use a WordPress install to interface with the Magento DB to stress server less.

Don’t forget that the 1.4x shipping API for Magento is B-U-S-T-E-D as of this writing. Here is the link I found:

http://magebase.com/magento-tutorials/shipment-api-in-magento-1-4-1-broken/

If you are considering working with Magento you must understand that the community version is out there to crowd source debugging. Living on the Magento forums for a long while now I see a specific pattern of disengagement from the Magento development team in addressing major issues. I am sure they would speak to the contrary.