IBM's New WebSphere Commerce Makes Web Sites Easier To FindIBM's New WebSphere Commerce Makes Web Sites Easier To Find

IBM is readying an upgrade to its WebSphere Commerce it says will help companies increase traffic to their Web sites.

New to WebSphere Commerce v. 6.0 is the ability to create static URL pages. This lets spider technology used by search engine sites, such as Google and Yahoo, query the URL, grab the keywords, and push the page back to the search engine so it shows up in the search results.

Web-site performance--speed and accuracy--is only half the battle. The other is getting the consumer to the site. Most consumers start the buying process searching on a word or phrase. The problem is that spider technology used by search engines can't query and find search keywords on every Web site because most Web pages are dynamically generated, says Craig Stevenson IBM's worldwide WebSphere E-commerce manager. He says the new feature WebSphere Commerce release drove search engine results from three to 278 hits for an unnamed company that worked with IBM to develop the technology.

The feature will ship as an integrated function in WebSphere Commerce v. 6.0, scheduled for release sometime between April and June 2005. Customers who have purchased v. 5.6 are eligible for an update.