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.

Recently we were referred a potential client requesting us to review his website and provide a cost estimate for attaining first page ranking for two specific keyword phrase queries in Google’s natural search results.  We thought it might be instructive to publish our email reply back, as an opportunity to introduce our general philosophy on SEO.

Hi —–,

We really appreciate ———- referring you to us, but we are not a pure play SEO firm that will give you a ‘guarantee’ about where you will end up. Be wary of a web design company that would!  However, we do know a lot about SEO and would be happy to consult with you on how to do-it-yourself or make a plan of action towards that goal.  It’s really not that hard and we advise that it’s best to learn and direct SEO strategy on your own rather than spend up to $2-3K a month for these services.  Others may disagree.

There are several different components to an effective SEO strategy.  Please allow us to explain a few concepts, and forgive us if you are already familiar with the following.  As a baseline, you need to attend to some basic structural elements throughout your website:

• Well-designed, hierarchical information architecture
• XML site map submitted to Google
• Title tags
• H1s
• Alt tags (photos and links)
• Meta-description
• Meta keywords
• Keyword density
• SEO friendly URLs

Take care of all that and you’ll doing well.  You can also do a lot with press releases:

• You can use press release distribution services to send newsworthy events out on the wire online, allowing online publishers and aggregators like Yahoo, Google, etc, to pick up your press release and publish it on their site. Just as important, you get a permanent page on this press release distribution site that links back to you.
• A word of caution:  you should hold yourself to a high standard and make sure that whatever you do is actually newsworthy. Some SEO firms believe in ‘creating news’ to be able to send out press releases all the time, but this approach seems unsavory to us.

Try to generate good inbound links:

• Target listing sites, partner companies, directory listings, blogs, etc, anyone that has a website that it would make sense to have your company mentioned with a link back to your site.
• Build quality links every month that will be there permanently linking back to your site. The more links you have and the longer they’ve been there the higher your page rank will go.

Be a blogger:

• Frame yourself as an expert within your industry
• Each blog post acts as yet another way for you to promote your agenda (more qualified traffic to your website). Many times your audience might find you through a search query that you would never predict, which is why having quality articles and posts on your site that discuss your industry using your industry language is very important.
• Open up the outgoing RSS feed on your blog post. With quality blog posts on your site you create the opportunity and possibility for others to want to display your content on their site. When others do that it creates backlinks to your site, which is what you want!

As an advanced technique, try a desirable ‘widget’ or freebie of some sort.  Be creative:

• If you offered something to your clients that they could put on their site, such as a ‘[-----] Certified Professional’ seal of some sort you could give them a reason to put something on their site that links back to a page on your site that explains that ‘seal of approval’. These are all free links from extremely relevant websites.
• What I mean by relevant is that it’s better when a website has related content to what you do. Having a link from ESPN to your site would be nice, but it wouldn’t necessarily be that powerful in the eyes of Google.

We can absolutely assist you in all these pursuits–we do these services all the time for clients– but we cannot guarantee a ranking because a) we focus on sites, not search, and b) our approach is to teach our clients to understand SEO for themselves first because it should be a long term goal.  It’s not hard to learn or implement basic SEO tactics.  All it takes is time and consistent effort.  We do understand that sometimes time can run in short supply, so If you’re interested in a referral we can recommend a very proficient SEO and PPC firm here in town that can do it all for you, but again, we believe that no outside party can do SEO work as well as you can do it for yourself.

Hope this is helpful to you, —–, please let us know if you have any questions or would like to schedule a time to talk.

Ever wondered how “The Google” turns your search for austin web design into entermedianow.com?  Google does a nice job of explaining how it works in simple language here:

Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes, and serves the web

You can familiarize yourself with Google’s own stated guidelines for helping its machines find, index and rank your site.  Some of these are pretty obvious, like make sure you don’t have any broken links or erroneous html, and try to keep number of links on any page under 100.  Others can’t be stated often enough:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Be sure you don’t run afoul and get kicked down or out of Google’s search results.  The best way to avoid trouble is to follow this advice:  “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.” Optimization is perfectly fine and a great idea, but don’t get carried away trying to game the system.  There’s better and easier ways to rank your own Google-friendly website, and here’s more good news:  we believe there’s no more qualified SEO expert for your site than you yourself.