March Tampa Bay Meetup (#7)

General Discussion/Announcements

Sever folks went to the Florida DrupalCamp last month. Some of our members even presented there (Adam and Joe). Everyone that went said they enjoyed it and that it was "well worth it". They all learned stuff, met people, ate some tasty food, and got t-shirts and other swag. All for $10 bucks. I know I'm bummed I couldn't make it. But they also mentioned the discussions going on about starting up another Florida Drupal Camp for South Florida, and planning it for the Fall.

Our Tampa Bay Drupal User Group site is up and running thanks to Mike. You can find it here: http://www.tbdug.com. If you haven't already, sign up for an account. Most of us regulars to the meetups are admins on the site and you could be to if you'd like. This will be a place that we can try out some new stuff and communicate to each other. The site is a fresh Drupal 7 install, and Mike has verified that the new module upload feature is working on this setup, so we can extend the functionality as we see fit. Now if only we could auto-upload new themes :) Mike brought up that we could form a little sub-comittee to manage the site, but we didn't really discuss any further. Until then, just be responsible and we'll play it by ear.

People asked about using the tbdug.com site as a practice area, and we decided that's likely not the best idea. It had been brought up in a meeting a while back, but Mike re-mentioned http://www.webenabled.com/, which has a free hosting option (it's small and a little hard to see under the main pay options) that will reset itself every 30 days. If you don't have access to an environment that you can test stuff out on, this may be helpful for you.

The Scheduler module was brought up, and mentioned that it will allow you to publish or unpublish content at pre-specified times. So you could have content that runs for a week and is automatically taken down, etc. A couple people at the meeting use this and find it very helpful for the needs of their sites.

SEO Presentation by Harry

Harry used one of his client sites, www.islandboatadventures.com, to provide a contextual example of the various aspects of SEO.

Major points:

• A search engine is a "dumb machine". I wants to know what is on your page, but it can't "see" it, or experience it, or feel it, etc. It can read the words on the page. End of story.
  • Your job is to help it understand this content by making sure relevant and contextual keywords are sprinkled throughout your site/pages.
  • E.g. if the title of your page (<h1>) was "Egmont Key" (a nice destination for a boat cruise), you can improve upon this by changing it to "Egmont Key Adventure Cruise". There is now more descriptive information on the page that will help the search engines understand the content better.
• Search engines like the <title> tag
  • Don't forget about this, as it's another vector to get valuable keywords associated with your site
  • Harry reccomends having a detailed title, but don't go crazy with it
    • A self imposed limit of ~80 characters is likely good
    • Don't make it just a list of keywords, this is frowned upon, it should be a structured statement/sentance
  • The Page Title module will give yo control over this element within Drupal
    • Tip: You must explicitly enable the module for all content types you would like to have control over the <title> tag for (you must check the "show field" box next to the desired content type on the modules configuration page)
• Image Alt tags are another important vector to get those keywords into your site/pages
  • Since the goal is to get keywords related to your business in here, try to be more descriptive to work in the keywords. E.g. if you had a picture of a lighthouse on your adventure boat site, you could enter your Alt tag as "A lighthouse", but a better choice would be "An historic lighthouse on Egmont Key".
  • Similar to the title tag, Harry recommends limiting the character count to ~80 characters
• Use headers where you can (h2, h3, h4, etc.) as these will help define your content and provide additional context to your page for the search engines, as well as making the page easier to read for us humans
• Meta Keywords and Description tags
  • There's a module for Drupal that will give you control over these, called Nodewords
  • Google doesn't use these tags (keywords or description) any longer with relation to your site and where it shows up in the results, as a result Harry no longer worries about the keywords
  • The description is not used for ranking your site, but can still be used as the short summary of that page when it does show up in the search results. If it has nothing to show, it will pull bits and pieces from the page to make a sort of content collage. If you have the description it can use this to provide a simple readable description of the page. Harry suggests this easier to read option may leave a better impression on users, so this is still worth doing.
• Optimizing your site to lower the load time is something that the search engines respect and factor into their rankings
• Google claims to not care what the URL of a site looks like any longer. But www.yourwebsite.com/stories/my-story is nice looking to humans than www.yourwebsite.com/?q=node/79, and likely more memorable for folks who do make it to your site.
  • Harry suggests enabling Clean Urls on your site as well as using the Pathauto module to ensure your content automatically gets a human friendly name.
• The source order of your content is also important (source ordered content), it was pointed out that a lot of Drupal themes (like Genesis, Zen, etc.) have already done this legwork for you so they're good starting points.

And when in doubt regarding SEO, here are a few resources to help you out:

• SEO Checklist module for Drupal gives you checklist right in your site of things to do. Some things it can see about your site and whether or not you've done them, others are things you would do off of your site. But it includes lots of links to modules and resources that will help you optimize your site for search engines.
• Google Webmaster Tools

Harry's summary of SEO was that if you keep your content "keyword rich and human friendly", you'll be well on your way.