People often ask us to explain the pros and cons between CMS platforms…why we prefer and often recommend Drupal for many of our client’s website projects.  While we acknowledge there’s more than one way to skin a cat, generally speaking we like Drupal because it’s open source, well-supported, highly extensible, popular, and SEO friendly.

What makes Drupal SEO friendly? Features and modules like the following:

• Enable Clean URLs - for instance, turns the awkward www.atlantashoulder.com/?q=/shoulder-treatment into the easy reading www.atlantashoulder.com/shoulder-treatment
• Path Module (or PathAuto Module) - allows you to create URL aliases (either automatically or manually) for your pages, rather than a default string of ugly/crazy letters and symbols (vm&ctl_nbr=2604&cid=TopNav, etc….).  Search engines tend to reward human-friendly URLs–even more so if they include relevant keywords.
• XML Sitemap Module - automatically generates a XML sitemap conforming to the sitemaps.org specification. Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org.
• Other Drupal modules useful for SEO: MetaTag Module; Custom Breadcrumbs Module; Related Links Module; Alinks Module; Search 404; URL List module; Global Redirects module

To sum up, properly implementing such modules into your site can play an integral role in the organic SEO process and help to automate some of the work and thinking towards getting your site ranked well in the search engine results pages for the keywords you are targeting.

A great collection of interviews from the illuminating Jeffery Zeldman starting with the past, present, and future of web standards (and then on to the history of blogging, open source collaboration, and more).

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

The above, known as Gall’s Law, makes good sense doesn’t it?

Perhaps another way:  if you can get the simple part right, you’ve done something.  And not until then.