In October 2011 we posted our annual results outlining the Best Ecommerce Software platforms in the industry for 2011. Today, however, our friends over at Aheadworks pulled together some graphics that provide a great indication of the actual situation in the e-Commerce marketplace. Granted, this is far from a comprehensive analysis but having studied and compared the results of our recent surveys, we came to some appealing conclusions.

Launched in 2007, the Magento platform has already changed the e-Commerce sphere and occupied the leading position at the market. Being the ultimate e-Commerce solution, nowadays it serves tens of thousands of merchants worldwide. The high popularity of the platform is proved by our survey that takes the top 1 million sites provided by Alexa.com, the web information company.

The search engines want to provide users with the best experience possible, and this is something that a lot of people overlook when optimizing websites. The basics are often covered, the page gets optimized on page and then the focus shifts to building links to the page both internal and external, but linking out is often overlooked.

If you were to take a step back, and instead of looking at the website from an optimization point of view you thought about what your visitors would find useful, the chances are there will be numerous places where you could provide a link out to further resources.

The results of our annual analysis of the top 1 Million sites spanning October, 2010 - October, 2011 are officially in! Our bots crawled the home pages of the top 1 million Alexa sites and analysed them for identifying features of 32 different eCommerce platforms.

Our June, 2011 survey discovered a total of 25,592 online stores and only 4 months later we found a 4% increase in online stores, detecting 26,594 in total. Both Zen Cart and Magento have seen incredible growths of 18% each, however, Magento is the real winner with over 20% of the eCommerce sites found being attributed to their platform.

Every search marketer understands that Link building is one of the most important aspect of improving a websites rankings and PageRank. It also happens to be one the most tedious, frustrating and expensive.  Finding incredible back link opportunities is kind of like finding that job you love, you know, the one you’re in now that gets you excited to go to work in the morning!

Google has released the first application programming interfaces for Google+, its new social network. This initial API set is intended for feedback and learning. You can experiment with it and build apps on it. Then, if you choose, you can give Google your feedback and ideas.

Here is a list of the Google+ APIs and tools on the new Google Developers site.