When my brothers and sisters and I got together last Thanksgiving down at my parents’ house I was actually really concerned. I didn’t know how they got so frail but now that they’re both in their 70s I worry about them and their health a lot more than I ever would have thought. They seemed to go from young and totally agile to elderly overnight and I just feel bad that I don’t live closer so I can really make things easier for them. I went to www.wildbluedeals.com/and got them internet for the house since my mom’s really into online shopping and as it was had to go to the library to do it. That just wasn’t working out since she had been having such a hard time driving. My dad on the other hand is still really good about doing things that require hand-eye coordination but his eyesight has gone downhill really fast. I think I need to plan a trip down sometime soon so we can go see an eye doctor and get him fixed.

My whole family is confused to the point of insanity. Like the rest of the world we love to watch the television. We now watch www.direct.tv as it broadcasts all of our favourite movies, sitcoms, and other programs. Our problem is that the selection is so vast that we cannot decide what to watch. I love the awesome and slightly dated ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ which features the new money family of the Clampets which is a real rags to riches story. My common law wife simply adores the little kid in ‘Two and a Half Men’. She just loves the way he is cheeky wi! thout being rude and seems to get away with his mischievous antics whilst he lives with his dad and his rich uncle.

My oldest boys only want to watch ‘South Park’ the animated sitcom. This is a fantastic cartoon which is really aimed at adults. The one line jokes in the show can be very close to the bone for younger children so we have to watch it first to ensure suitability for the kids. My daughter has just started to watch ‘Everybody Hates Chris’ which is a comedy about a boy growing up in the mean streets and learning to get on in life and school. All the sitcoms are brilliant I just wish I had more television sets.

If you want to be found on the internet, most people, even novices, know that having a site friendly to Search Engine crawlers and algorithm (mostly Google) is important for traffic.  One of the most difficult arenas for ecommerce sites, is that most of the content is duplicate content, when it comes to the description of a product.  There are only so many ways you can describe a purple cotton silk shirt or a plasma TV.  So it’s ever more important to bring all that you’ve got to the table when operating an eCommerce site.  One of the biggest elements in SEO is to have keywords in the url itself, which an eCommerce platform, AscenderCart, takes care of.  Their SEO shopping cart, takes care of what many eCommerce overlook and that’s taking care of the URL.  The shopping cart features custom keyword rich URLs (of course you’ll have to research and choose your keywords  – but the fact that you CAN do this is a big plus), custom image alt attributes, page titles, breadcrumbs (a great plus for search crawlers), custom H1 headers, configurable meta descriptions, 301 redirection, and the works.

Some other features that I like with Ascender Cart are the reviews section.  Although I would have loved to see them take an extra step with making the reviews rdfa compatible for Google to pull in search listings.  I also liked their easy to use interface/dashboard, integrated customer management and blog/w template creator, an affiliate module, gift registry and wish list, plus more.  They even offer a FREE SEO training manual.

Wanna hear more?

Are there any alternatives out there?  Well, there is another open source CMS being touted as an advanced SEO CMS, website,  and ecommerce solution claimed to work out of the box.  This SEO CMS product is called SEO Toaster and is developed by the SEO company, SEO Samba.

If you are already familiar with how WordPress works, you should have an easy time with using SEO Toaster.  SEO toaster’s dashboard has a “beginners” feel to it, as their dashboard is very simple to navigate and not “messy” with lots of tools.  Although the choice of lime green coloring is a bit jarring for today’s type of web design.

While digging through the features, I couldn’t get a feel for it being the most advanced system  for SEO, but by default I think it could be.  The SEO software can help you get setup and place you at the right path, but SEO will still require some human input and research (keyword targeting, anchor text choices, etc.)

I do give props to the creators for providing some excellent looking themes for their SEO Toaster product.  The themes come very close to appearing like a blogging or news type of templates.  It would be excellent to see how much support the creators offer and how many downloads they have already received to get an idea of how big is the community.  That will be its biggest draw to getting new users and retaining current ones.

The easiest route to exchanging free links is with their link exchange manager to offer instructions to other webmasters on how to place links.  As a webmaster/site owner you can offer more than one site for available link exchanges, by listing available sites to build links.  If you are not one to participate in the forums they do offer a link exchange tool and you will automatically receive links.

It’s definitely a site to check out and test.  It’s free.