Author : campbell

SEO for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal: Which one is the Most Search Engine Friendly CMS?

Content Management System (CMS) is a buzzword in the IT industry these days. While business and website owners want a CMS just because it sounds so impressive, website developers love it for all the benefits it has brought. Thanks to CMS, there is hardly any need to hand code HTML and PHP scripts. That does not imply that there is no need of a developer anymore. CMS is simply a tool to help a developer create better solutions in less time.

The one difficult issue, perhaps, is making the right choice between WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, three of the most popular and powerful CMSs out there. All of them are open-source tools based on PHP and MySQL with regular updates. Each has extra plugins including ones for SEO. The plugins are called plugins in WordPress, extensions an Joomla and modules in Drupal.

While there are many factors on which a CMS is compared, an important one is its SEO friendliness. Let’s take a look at WordPress, Joomla and Drupla and determine how each one rates on the SEO scale.

ABOUT WORDPRESS
WordpressWordPress has been around since 2003 as an open source blogging tool and CMS platform. More than 200 million websites online are based on WordPress. Due to its notable user-friendliness, it is considered the foremost choice for small websites and blogs.

With WordPress, everything is so easy that many website and blog owners just choose to do it all by themselves. This definitely earns it negative points from developers.
As one of the most commonly used CMS, WordPress offers thousands of plug-ins and a huge community ready to help, two very attractive incentives.
When it comes to features, WordPress proves to be more generous than most people expect CMSs to be. A basic WP website not only offers the usual search, comment, tag, index, etc., but also provides multi-level access and authorship for up to ten users.

SEO for WordPress
For SEO, WordPress is perhaps the most powerful CMS, most favorite as well, due to a plethora of SEO plugins and its supportive community. The SEO module All in One SEO pack allows you greater control over your titles, descriptions and duplicate content. Another good module is Google XML Sitemaps which automatically generates a sitemap to submit to Google webmaster tools. Features such as tagging, indexing and WP’s clean URLs make things even better. WordPress sites can get a high ranking; however, as with any website your ranking greatly depends on the effort you put in the keyword selection and optimization process. Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion to optimize your WordPress site.

ABOUT JOOMLA
JoomlaUnlike WordPress which is foremost a blogging platform, Joomla is and always has been a pure CMS; consequently, it offers a window of opportunity for developers as well as designers. Because it is not that simple to use, it is unlikely that just anyone could create a Joomla-based website without help from a developer.

The best thing about Joomla is that it offers plenty of room for customization. There are numerous extensions and plug-ins, which further add to its abilities.
Joomla has a powerful API which enables easy integration into other systems and software. Therefore, there are endless possibilities for developers to create unique and customized websites.

SEO for Joomla
When it comes to SEO, Joomla has been severely criticized since its inception. And although there is ongoing talk about its awful built-in URLs and encrypted plug-ins, newer updates and extensions have changed the story. A proficient developer with a broad understanding of SEO can obtain great results and ranking with Joomla. However, it still lacks ease-of-use and is not considered favorable in terms of SEO. But given the popularity of Joomla over 400 extensions come up in a search for SEO. A few of these SEO extensions facilitate the job of optimizing titles descriptions, page names, links and other factors. Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion to optimize your Joomla site.

ABOUT DRUPAL
DrupalJust like Joomla, Drupal offers flexibility and power to handle huge, complex and highly customized websites. Released in 2001, it is also the most senior among the three open source CMSs under discussion here. Developers love it because it does not limit their ability to create large, robust and scalable websites.

One major difference between Joomla and Drupal is that the latter is more developer-centric rather than designer-centric.
Drupal offers better extensibility than Joomla or WordPress. The add-ons are easier to integrate with the core and third-part systems alike. Overlapping issues are not common, making Drupal a reliable platform as well.
Drupal is an excellent choice for a website where security is a key factor. Even the third party extensions are almost as secure as Drupal core.

SEO for Drupal
Drupal takes the cake here. Although, WordPress does offer best SEO possibilities, it is still not flexible and robust enough for large and complex websites. Drupal offers a good level of control over SEO. It has everything ranging from SEO-friendly URLs to extensive SEO modules. Moreover, there are plenty of tools that automate the whole SEO aspect for a website. Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion to optimize your Drupal site.

Conclusion
There is simply no point of argument or viable comparison between these three most popular open source CMS as they widely differ. The choice depends on the website’s requirements and the developer’s own style and preference. Nevertheless, SEO for WordPress tends to yield better results and ranking if forced to choose. The content of the website, the keyword choices the optimization and the quality incoming links are much bigger factors for good search engine rankings than the choice of CMS.

Written by Tammy Corbett

Tammy Corbett is the resident expert for social media marketing at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.
www.redcarpetweb.com

Social Media Marketing Strategies

There has been a significant increase in the popularity of social media websites over the past few years. With it has come a shift in the way that people search for information and how they share and consult opinions on the internet when making purchasing decisions.

social-mediaSocial Media MarketingSocial media sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg, give users a voice on the internet by providing tools to connect, exchange views, share content, information, and recommend products and services using the “thumbs up or down” approach. This has caused a huge shift in the way people search for information online. More and more, Internet users rely on the opinions of others before they buy into the validity of a product or service. “Word of mouth” is no longer only from mouth to ear, but is more frequently spread on social media sites and it has never been so powerful. Any product or service deemed worthy are promoted, shared, or discouraged against in these online social communities.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) targets users by promoting content through bookmarking, blogging, online video sharing, and social networking to potentially expand their audience and drive traffic to their website. Businesses are beginning to understand the power of these influences when it comes to establishing a reputation and growing their online business. Social media marketing strategies such as a business’ engagement in various social media websites can help to generate branding and a personal connection with its users.

Business Profiles
One of the most important social media marketing methods includes posting business profiles on social media websites such as Facebook and linkedIn. Instead of waiting around for consumers to come to you, you have to reach out to your target audience. Solidifying your presence in the social media community creates a direct interaction between business and consumer that may not dramatically increase conversion rates but is definitely capable of establishing branding power and credibility. The valuable feedback consumers provide promotes insight in determining what business strategies are working and what could be re-evaluated to make a website more user-friendly.

Search Results
facebookFacebookThe influence of social media sites has changed the way search engines define placement. Images, videos and news content featured on social media sites such as Youtube, Digg, and Flickr are equally capable of sitting comfortably at the top of the search results leaving others, who have not yet jumped on the social media bandwagon, a little confused.

Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies
Take a hint from the popular social media websites by adding some type of interactive quality to your website. Engage the viewer and create an atmosphere of inclusion and direct contact that encourages a user to come back and visit again. Forums and social applications can help you compete for traffic in an evolving market.

Become an expert in your niche. Yahoo Answers is a great place to start. You can create a business or company profile and begin answering direct questions and supplying information to those in your target audience.

Join Social Networks. Social networking provides a means to promote association and the exchange of knowledge while also establishing business contacts and connections. Post your business profile in the popular social and business networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but also make sure to concentrate your attention on your niche audience by joining social media networks that represent and support your business or company’s ideas.

For example if you are selling organic produce and you set up a profile in a social media network such as Care2.com, an environmental portal, you are then communicating directly with those individuals who will support your product or service because of a shared interest. These types of social media communities will extend their approval by sharing in discussions about your products or services with other users and even in some cases “become a fan” of your featured webpage.

Some examples of popular niche social networks include:

TravBuddy.com for the traveller
Tipd.com for those seeking financial advice
AutoSpies.com providing money saving and insider information on cars

Publish articles to popular social media news sites such as Mixx.com, Digg.com, and Propeller.com. These sites allow you to post articles and vote on news stories.

Share videos and images by setting up accounts with Youtube.com and Flickr.com, leaders in online video and imaging to reach a broad or targeted audience.

Social bookmarking on sites such as Del.ici.ous and Ma.gnolia.com provide an opportunity to store and share links.

Blogging enables you to provide information and updates about your business to customers.

Businesses that incorporate social media marketing into their conventional marketing plan have the advantage of reaching audiences using a whole new approach. The benefits of branding and traffic are just the tip of the iceberg, establishing your business as a leading authority in your industry promotes good quality links, better search engine placement, which in turn increases sales.

Written by Tammy Corbett

Tammy Corbett is the resident expert for social media marketing at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.
www.redcarpetweb.com

Picking Apart PageRank

Google is currently the darling of web surfers. With robust algorithms such as PageRank, Google helps users find relevant results, quickly. But while PageRank may be a boon for searchers, it is also the bane of webmasters because it is one of the most difficult ranking factors to control.

PageRank is the brainchild of Google co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It is a system for ranking web pages that is based on an assumption popular among academics: that the importance of a research paper can be judged by the number of citations it has from other researcher papers.

The pair simply came up with the web page equivalent: the importance of a web page can be judged by the number of links it has from other web pages.

To find out what a website’s PageRank is, you’ll need to install the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

The Google toolbar sits underneath your address bar and displays a bar graph representing the PageRank of the page you are viewing.

toolbar

How it All Works

When a user visits Google and enters a query, several things happen. First, Google finds all the web pages in its index that match the search term. Next, out of these results, Google selects a subset of web pages that have the greatest relevance to the query.

At this point, PageRank is not a factor at all. Google first looks at all the usual factors such as keyword density and prominence to calculate relevance. PageRank only comes into play as a multiplier after all these other factors have been calculated. In other words:

Final Ranking = (score for all other relevance factors) x (PageRank rating).

To determine a page’s PageRank, Google looks at a web page and counts how many incoming links are pointing to it. Google regards these links as “votes”. If one site links to another site, it is essentially casting a vote for that site.

Google doesn’t just count the total number of “votes” or links that a web page receives to determine its PageRank however; it also analyzes the web page that casts the vote.

Votes cast by pages that Google deems “important”, i.e., sites that already have a high PageRank, are given more weight and help to increase the PageRank of the web pages they link to.

The actual PageRank of a web page is calculated as the sum of the PageRank of all the web pages linking to it, divided by the number of outgoing links on each of those pages.

Improving Your PageRank

Improving your website’s PageRank may sound easy: just find sites with a high PageRank to link to your site. In reality however, it’s not that simple.

Many webmasters with sites with a high PageRank, will not link to a site with a lower PageRank; it simply isn’t worth their while to do so. Moreover, even if they do link to your page, if they also link to numerous other pages, the PageRank is divided among all the outgoing links.

Consequently, it may actually be beneficial to propose link exchanges with quality sites with a slightly lower PageRank: competition for links from such sites is less fierce and webmasters may be more willing to reciprocate links.

Click here for additional tips on improving your PageRank.

The Trouble with PageRank

While the premise behind PageRank may hold true within the halls of academia, when applied to web pages, its flaws start to show.

Although it would seem like common sense that a website would only link to another site if it had good content, in reality, websites link to sites with poor content all the time. Webmasters may engage in purely commercial link exchanges, or they may link to a page because they use that website’s counters or banner ads on their own website.

Moreover, affiliate websites that generate revenue through pay-per-click links may artificially inflate their client’s PageRank, thus undermining any notion of a natural PageRank.

New sites are often the worse affected by PageRank. Regardless of their quality, new sites will always have fewer incoming links and therefore, a lower PageRank. Consequently, getting sites with a higher PageRank to link to them will be difficult.

websites with a good PageRank however, have no trouble soliciting links. Because of their good PR, they tend to rank highly in the search engine results pages. Since they rank highly in the results pages, people tend to link to them, creating a vicious cycle.

Final Thoughts

While PageRank is one of the hardest factors to influence, it can still be manipulated. As more and more people discover these strategies, the utility of PageRank will undoubtedly be diminished.

-Julie Joseph

Julie Joseph is a search engine optimizer and copywriter at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.

4-Step Plan to Getting the Most Out of Your Keyphrases

Every January, amidst off-key renditions of Auld Lang Syne and second-rate champagne, we make resolutions for the New Year. We resolve to lose weight, to exercise more often, or even to quit smoking. As e-business professionals and webmasters however, there is one resolution that we should add to our list: the resolution to use keyphrases more effectively.

Keyphrases are common terms visitors enter into search engines to find products and services. When used effectively, keyphrases can increase the amount of qualified search engine traffic your website receives.

Before you start debating the merits of lime green over teal green for your website’s color scheme, before you start writing copious amounts of marketing copy, in fact, before you do anything, it is a good idea to do some keyphrase research.

The two main objectives of keyphrase research are:

  • To find the best keyphrases for the products and services you offer.
  • To find common sense keyphrases that people understand, and would actually search for.

Below are 4 important steps to help you achieve these goals.

Step One: Brainstorming
The first thing you need to do is consider your business and the types of products you sell. Now write down a list of keyphrases that directly relate to those products. Avoid jargon, gobbledygook or marketing buzzwords, and instead, try to put yourself in Joe consumer’s shoes. What search terms would the average person use when trying to find such products?

Let’s say for example, that you run an online business that specializes in gag gifts. You might initially come up with keyphrases such as whoopi cushions, fake vomit, rubber chickens, etc. This will not be a definitive list. In fact, most of the terms you come up with will probably be discarded later on. But for now, it is a good start.

If you are having trouble zeroing in on keyphrases, try using Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool

Overture is a pay-for-placement search engine that allows you to register and bid on keyphrases. Fortunately, without having to do either, you can use the suggestion tool to find out how many times a term was searched for during the preceding month. The tool also displays a list of related search terms that include your keyphrase. Note that the order of the words in your key phrase is irrelevant.

Step Two: Digging Deeper
Now that you have a list of keyphrases in hand, it is time to start researching in earnest. A powerful tool that will help simplify the process, is a specialized database called Wordtracker. Wordtracker is much more precise than Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool. Wordtracker’s database contains millions of queries from metacrawler.com and dogpile.com (metacrawlers that query the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista simultaneously) compiled over a two month period.

Using our hypothetical gag gift business once again, let’s say you enter the keyphrase “whoopi cushion” into Wordtracker’s database. Wordtracker will tell you how often people searched for the term and how many competing sites use the same keyphrase.

Suppose you discover that “whoopi cushions” is not a highly searched-for term? Using Wordtracker’s lateral search results, you can easily find related terms that are more popular — “gag gift” for example.

Step Three: A Few Calculations
Finding a highly searched- for keyphrase that relates to your products is all well and good, but if your competitors have all optimized their web pages for the same keyphrase, you will only be another small fish in a big pond.

The best keyphrases are not just the ones that are popular; they are the ones with fewer competing web pages.

This is where the concept of KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) comes in. To calculate a keyphrase’s KEI, you square the popularity of the keyphrase, and divide it by its competitiveness (the number of web pages returned in a search engine’s results pages when you search for an exact keyphrase).

The formula for KEI is (P^2/C).

P = The popularity of the keyword.
C = The competitiveness.

Fortunately, Wordtracker incorporates the KEI into its database, so you don’t have to do the calculations yourself.

Let’s say the keyphrase “gag gift” has a count result of 1500 in Wordtracker’s database, and a competing result of 20,000 in AltaVista. The KEI rating for gag gifts (in AltaVista) would be 112.5. Of course, you would also have to calculate the KEI for the other top search engines as well.

The higher the KEI rating, the better the keyphrase.

Step Four: Putting it All Together
Once you have found your main keyphrase (you may also wish to include secondary keyphrases on inner pages) it is time to start optimizing your content.

Here are some guidelines to follow:

  • Place keyphrases in Title tags, Meta tags, and in the <H1>-<H6> tags.
  • Use the main keyphrase at least 3-5 times in the body of the home page.
  • Place keyphrases prominently in the beginning of paragraphs, alt tags, hyperlinked text, and bold text.
  • Write copy that is between 250-300 words in length on each web page, and make sure the text focuses on the keyphrase.

Final Words
Keyphrase research can be a time a consuming affair. It may take as many as 2-3 days to collate and analyze all the data. Still, it is well worth the effort because it offers such a high return on investment. So if you keep one resolution this year, make sure it is to use keyphrases more effectively. After all, you can always lose weight, exercise more often, or quit smoking next year.

-Julie Joseph

Julie Joseph is a search engine optimizer and copywriter at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.