SEO

We've had several clients working with memberships, who have a single name field with the full name of a person. And then they ask us to build a directory that is sorted by last name. This is a bit hard to do if there's a first name in front of it!

Names don't follow rules very well. Some have apostrophes in them, some have multiple words -- you can't just take the last word of a name and assume that's the last name, because often it just isn't.

Drupal has long had a variety of access control modules, to make it so you can easily control who can view or edit particular pages. There are actually several different layers of APIs to control this in Drupal core -- the modules generally provide a user interface to let you control access by content type, by tagging content with particular terms, through their position on a menu, or through a group. The Field Permissions module lets you control access to particular fields on an entity.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Moz.com, SEO is “a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results”.

A common question of companies wanting to drive traffic to their website is “Should we advertise in the search engines? Or conduct a search engine optimization project? Neither? Both?” Based on 20 years of helping people with marketing in search engines, here are a few thoughts.

Ha. Just got another message from a client who has been the victim of several comment spam campaigns:

There's a few problems with setting up shop on the web. All of your competitors are right next door. You're in the worst neighborhood, with crooks inventing new tools to break in every day. That parking lot you just built now has to accommodate scooters and semi trucks.

I have been interested in setting up clients with blog sites for a few years now and I know they really help drive business to your website. Any way you can continue to let your potential clients know how knowledgeable you are on your profession is a bonus.

You launched your Drupal site yesterday, and it's not on the front page of Google. What do you do now? One of our clients asked us about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recently, so I thought I'd share some advice from our experience.