The decision to go with Drupal is further testament to the power, reliability, security, and just pure awesomeness found in this open source application. Not only does Drupal give developers a powerful tool for creating dynamic and creative websites, it also gives website owners the ability to maintain their website with little or no technical knowledge.

At Digital Stax, customers are amazed by how easy it is to add and change content on their new website. The Drupal CMS is included with all of our websites. Those considering creating a new website or switching their old website to Drupal are more than welcome to contact us for a free consultation.

There are two major components of SEO:  onsite SEO and offsite SEO.

Onsite SEO involves optimizing the content, coding, and other aspects of your website to make it search engine friendly.  Some activities in this category might include adding keywords to the text of your website, reorganizing the content of your website, and optimizing your HTML code. All of these activities allow your website to better “communicate” to search engines what your site is about and the quality of your content. This is sometimes an overlooked aspect of SEO, but is a critical step when conducting your campaign.

Offsite SEO is the part of search engine optimization that most people are referring to when they use the term.  There is a lot of controversy and differing opinions and ideas about Offsite SEO, but everyone can agree on one thing: Links are important. Very important. More specifically, when conducting an SEO campaign you want to acquire links on quality websites and ideally on websites with content similar to your own.

The keywords used when creating these links are especially important. To demonstrate this,  go over to Google and type “click here” and then look at the first result.

Are you surprised by the result? The website isn’t clickhere.com, there’s no mention of “click here” in the title, description, or anywhere on the web page. So, why is this?

There are links all over the web that look just like this: click here to download Adobe Reader. There are likely millions of these links that have the words “click here” and are pointing to Adobe’s website. Of course, there’s little value in ranking high for those keywords, but it definitely demonstrates the importance of keywords in your links.

So back to our example of a barber in Springfield, Missouri, he would probably want to create links that look like this:  barber springfield, mo or something similar. And he would want to choose wisely where these links should be placed and how many.

There’s much more to SEO than what I’ve covered in this post. And regardless of the activities undertaken, it’s important to remember that all of this takes time. In fact, somtimes it takes a great deal of time and effort before you will rank well in search engines such as Google. But, in the end, your persistance will pay off.

That’s just the beginning of what you can do with a CMS. But the greatest advantage that it offers my clients is the ability to update content after I have created the design and made all of the configurations for them.

There are many CMS options available. Some are commercial applications and others are Open Source. For individual website owners, nonprofits, and small- to medium-sized businesses, the latter is usually the best way to go. That’s because Open Source means free! Open source software is developed and maintained by communities of programmers and is available for anyone to use.  And just because it’s free doesn’t mean that  the quality is in any way inferior. The CMS that I primarily use (Drupal) is even being used by some of the largest players in the corporate world such as Yahoo!, AOL, Warner Brothers Records, US Magazine and many others.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve worked late into the night fixing a problem with a website because of bugs in different versions of Internet Explorer. For a site that I am currently developing, the client wanted a simple calendar to share upcoming events with visitors. I decided to embed Google Calendar rather than reinvent the wheel and create a new application. After installation, it looks perfect in Firefox (and, surprisingly, even IE6). But, of course, it looks absolutely awful in IE7. Perhaps another late night is ahead of me

EDIT:  OK, it turns out that it works in IE7 after all.  I was running IE8 instead of emulating IE7. But whatever, my point still stands.