ENTERMEDIA has built a lot of websites since 2004 for clients of all types. Over the years we’ve gravitated to build practically every site with Drupal. Why is that?

Drupal is flexible.

From it’s inception Drupal was built with open source in mind. The founder of Drupal was smart enough to realize that predicting where the web will go in the future is a fool’s game, so let’s build it to be as flexible and modular as possible so it can adapt to each clients needs as well as any future developments. Remove as many constraints as possible at the outset. What this means is that you need to understand best practices for development to contribute modules that the rest of the community will endorse and adopt, but isn’t that how it should be? For instance, old site planning methodologies such as the waterfall project management approach, were concerned with concepts like knowing exactly where the main navigation menu was going to be before you would write a single line of code. With Drupal, if you decide that the main nav needs to move to the right side or left side instead of across the top you can make that change in a matter of minutes, so long as you haven’t styled the whole site prematurely.

Drupal is modular.

The devil is in the details when you are developing a website. Unfortunately, the majority of projects do not achieve the initial goal of building the entire scope on-time and on-budget. That’s because unless the developer has previously coded something exactly like what you need now, he’s having to estimate how he can get the job done on assumptions alone.  Building every simple thing from scratch is hard.

But with Drupal, ‘there’s a module for that.

Like the Apple store’s claim ‘there’s an app for that’, there’s most likely a feature rich Drupal module that does what you need and can be configured for your exact requirements. If not, there will be soon. There are over 3500 modules that can be used in Drupal to accomplish just about any requirement you can imagine.  Many times multiple modules are introduced that do the same thing, but over time the best solution emerges and the community gets behind it.  Once a module is adopted and accepted by the Drupal community it will be continuously tested and refined to fix any issues or add any ‘got-to-have’ features due to it’s vast number of implementations and specific feedback.  Developers help developers figure out these problems, and then the rest of us get to share in their solutions.

Drupal is scalable.

Drupal works with practically any type of database, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using an enterprise level Oracle databases or a free MySQL database. Without getting too technical, what you need to know is that Drupal can scale to meet your needs, but you’ll need an experienced Systems/Server Admin toproperly guide you to the right hosting a server setup. The greater point is that Drupal can scale as well as any other technology. The best proof is the number of large web properties who are successfully using Drupal, such as the economist. You can find more example drupal sites on the founder of Drupal’s blog.

Drupal is SEO friendly.

SEO is largely misunderstood from our experience. Drupal makes it easy for you to make your site follow best SEO practices.  It also allows you to write, publish, and correct problems with your site content that the search engines might not like with a little training and without needing a web developer to be involved.  Drupal does a lot of things automatically, such as provide strong internal link structure to make sure each link to pages within the site are tagged in the same way.  Drupal does not do SEO for you, however.  For more information on what you should be doing to practice good SEO, start here for a simple overview, but go here if you’re looking for professional help.

Drupal is free.

Drupal is open source and is therefore free of charge.  You will need to pay for hosting if you don’t have your own web server, and if you’re not a web developer you will probably need to hire a good team if you’re hoping for something professional.  However, you won’t have to pay Microsoft liscensing fees, the hosting for open source costs less, and the majority of the web is open source, so there are plenty of capable people in this world who can support a Drupal based website.

Drupal has momentum.

Like most movements, what’s critical to the success of Drupal is the huge adoption rate of the development community and the business community in general.  It is one of the greatest crowd-sourcing success stories around.  It is this community that will decide if Drupal deserves it’s success, if it should continue on, and for how long.  The Drupal 7 User Experience Project is a good reason to believe that Drupal will continue to be the best available option for years to come.  Already, some very big and important websites are built with Drupal, like:

• The British Government
  
• The Whitehouse
• Duke University
• Lucas Arts
• Reuters
• CNN

Drupal is simply an efficient tool.

Drupal is a content management system that allows non-technical site owners to manage their own content. It’s open source, which means it’s free as well. It still requires a high level of experience and expertise in web development practices and principles to build a professional website, which is not free unless you are one of those people. Drupal is simply the tool that allows you to do great things like build an online storefront, event listings, a social community, blog, photo slideshow, multimedia video player, forums, discussion groups, etc.

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.

We published our first press release on the topic of how much we grew in 2008.

Pretty cool to see this get picked up by Yahoo news wire, and a good experience overall.

Read it here!

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.