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Interview With Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com About Migrating to Drupal and SEO

SEOBook.com logo
Aaron is a relatively famous SEM/SEO and has obviously built a lot of sites. After he migrated his main site, SEOBook.com to Drupal and then even made a optimistic prediction about the future of Drupal I was curious about Aaron's experiences and wanted to see what he had to say about the process and why he likes Drupal. He was kind enough to respond with these answers.

1. What initially motivated you to migrate seobook.com from MovableType to Drupal?

I originally used MovableType, but I wanted to create a site with premium content and permissions based access. The Drupal premium module facilitated that quite well. Plus my developer really liked Drupal and saw it as being extensible enough to do everything I wanted (integrate with our affiliate program, create a structured online training program , offer page by page control of premium or regular access, allow me to offer free snippets on some of the premium content, integrate with vBulletin forums, and integrate with the Paypal IPN).

2. What CMS (or mix of CMS) do you use as the basis for new projects?

Honestly most of my projects usually come in a couple waves. A small mini-site using flat files or server side incles, put up so I can start promoting it right away, and then as I decide to grow it out I typically switch off to Drupal or Wordpress on most sites. The really easy small and bloggy type projects get Wordpress, but Drupal is used on the more complex ones.

3. Was anything about Drupal particularly hard to get used to? Hard to migrate to? Anything particularly easy and beneficial?

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Announcing Drupal Dashboard - Essential Information for Busy Professionals

If you liked the Drupal Digest, you've probably been sad the last few months wondering what happened. Well, Drupal Dashboard is finally here to fill in the hole that was left in your hearts when DrupalDigest.com was usurped.

What is the Drupal Dashboard

It's a simple concept: if you try to pay attention to all the sources of information coming from Drupal you will quickly die of information overload. Instead, we will have a few people paying attention to these information feeds and then summarizing them for you. For now, there is a Important CVS Commit feed and an Important Module Releases feed. If you would like to add a filtered version of something (the development mailing list? drupal.org/planet?) please contact me. You can read more information about Drupal Dashboard like how it was built in the About Drupal Dashboard page.

My favorite tag lines for the Dashboard: "All wheat, no chaff" or "Essential information for busy professionals" or "We read everything so you don't have to." Yeah. If you notice any problems with the site I'd love to hear about those too - it's an infant still. There's plenty left on the todo list not least of which is "fix all bugs."

Drupal SEO Video Tutorials (and i18n and l10n and new features)

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Jason Calacanis

As a favor to GrayWolf about Jason Calacanis and whether SEO is legitimate or not.

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In a keynote address today Jason Calacanis said “SEO is bullshit, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly” Let’s see if that’s true.

Jason Calacanis - The Weblog

Jason Calacanis - Weblogs, Inc.

Jason Calacanis - via Wikipedia

Jason Calacanis - via JenSense.com

Jason Calacanis - Gothamist

Jason Calacanis - Technorati

Jason Calacanis - Techcrunch

Jason Calacanis - The Media Center

Jason Calacanis - New York Magazine

Jason Calacanis - via digg

Jason Calacanis - via Edge

Jason Calacanis - via Blog Business

Feel free to Reproduce this Jason Calacanis post on any website you own. And be sure to link to My Squidoo Jason Calacanis fan page and MySpace Jason Calacanis fan page

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new "ignore this content" tag for robots

One of the problems that search engines hit on is that a page is just a blob of text to them. And when they look for keywords in that text they aren't 100% sure if they are looking in the "content" of the page or in links to other pages.

This can cause serious problems!

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TradeMarks and Keyword stuffing

Trademark Enforcement of a Certain Term Within Open Source

So, I don't want to say the term, but it's clear from this search that a company has been going around to various places and enforcing a trademark. When that happens to open source projects, it gets discussed in public and everybody knows about that action. If they do it to some close-walled company then the discussion is inside the walls and nobody knows. So, thanks to the open practices of open source projects, people can know what kind of a company they are dealing with when they deal with Collabrio.

Keyword Stuffing

One of the "tricks" of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that people will try to use is called "keyword stuffing". Basically, search engines use the frequency and density of certain keywords to determine the importance of a word on a site. It makes sense that if I write a certain word or phrase a high number of times in my pages that it's an important word to me and probably the subject of the page. Webmasters (and SEOs) will take the keywords for which you are trying to get a good ranking and weave them into more parts of the site and content so that your site gets a high ranking. In the "if 2 is good, 100 is better" mindset, this can be pushed too far and the content no longer makes sense. So, what if you could use the word on the page hundreds of times but hide it from users by making the text white on a white background? This would confuse search engines into giving you a higher ranking than you deserve! Search engines don't like to be tricked. Tricking them means that their results are less valuable to their users.

Reporting Keword Stuffers

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