SEO Expert Blog

This site is now running on Drupal 6, yeah! The basic part of the upgrade process was straightforward:

• Backing up the site with a backup script.
• Deactivating all contrib modules and themes.
• Moving the Drupal 5 files to a new directory.
• Unpacking Drupal 6 and contrib modules in the web root directory.
• Running the database update script.
• Activating contrib modules and themes.
• Running the database update script again.

If you plan to upgrade a Drupal site without having done so before, I highly recommend this screencast by Angie Byron. The video walks you through upgrading a site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5, but most of the information applies to a Drupal 5 to 6 upgrade as well. Also read the Upgrading Handbook.

In this short video Search Engine Marketer Brian Chappell recommends some basic SEO measures for a Drupal site. Since Drupal is very search engine friendly out of the box, there are not many things you need to do.

Brian recommends to activate the core path module and to additionally install the Page Title, Global Redirect, and Meta Tags modules. In his accompanying blog post are also some notes on the .htaccess and robots.txt files.

ShoppingAds (formerly AuctionAds) is a Drupal module for adding shoppingads.com CPA and CPC advertising banners to nodes of selected node types.

Module Features

• Enter ad keywords or let them be added automatically by using the terms associated with a node.
• If terms are used as ad keywords you can limit the number of terms to be used as search terms.
• Restrict terms used as ad keywords to a selected vocabulary.
• Select from 12 Ad formats.
• Support for shoppingads ad campaigns.
• Select the weight to position the ads above or below the content.
• Select whether to display ads in full view and or teaser view.
• Select the node types you want ads to be displayed.
• Enter color values for border, background, heading, description and links.
• Select the ad style or attitude.
• Specify whether to open ad links in new windows.

I first heard about the Theme Developer module in Lullabot Podcast No. 52. This new Drupal 6 module is part of the great Devel Package, that helps developing for Drupal in many ways.

Yesterday, I watched the Theme Developer Screencast where Moshe Weitzman guides us on how to use the Theme Developer module and what can be done with it. Moshe Weitzman, Jeff Robbins, and Joon Park did nothing less than creating the Firebug for Drupal theming, wow!

Sectionnav is a module for Joomla 1.0.x that lets you create a navigation menu for the sections of your site. The menu that will be generated consists of three levels: sections, categories, and content items.

Admins can specify the sections to be listed by entering a comma separated list of at least two section IDs in the module configuration. The order of the entered IDs determines the order of the output list. By default all specified sections will be displayed as an unordered list (ul-tag) in the module.