Earlier this week I was pleasantly surprise to see how high OpenConcept was ranking on a number of interesting search terms related to our work. I was simply reviewing our logs an the search phrases which were coming up in the recent past. We are presently using thee search keywords module for Drupal so we can easily browse through search terms that are being used by our visitors.

• best it consultant open source (3rd)
• best open source wiki (8th)
• promoting campaigns (1st)
• i18n translation (1st)
• websites impact (1st with google.ca)
• creative commons images (8th)
• dreamweaver vs drupal & build drupal site in dreamweaver (1st for both)
• civicrm drupal internationalization & drupal i18n (1st & 5th)
• first nations consulting (7th)
• MySQL 3.2 (5th)
• ipod pdf (1st)
• jack layton stephen harper with facebook (2nd & 7th)
• Canadian Blood Services via MSN (9th & 6th)
• mysql Redhat (7th)
• union organizing in Canada (7th)
• regex screen scraping php (1st)
• In Canada with the term consulting (5th)

These rankings have actually improved since I drafted this article, but these rankings should be assumed to be inaccurate when you read this. The Canadian specific ones I expect will change as more people start blogging here.

We've done a number of little things along the way, but word of mouth is largely how we have attracted customers in the past. In the past search engine placement has never been a very high priority. We have made efforts to have a standards compliant xhtml design so that the content an style are as cleanly separated as you can do with html. This helps all visually impaired users, including search engines, to understand your content better.

Drupal has a number of core features and additional modules which really help search engines. There are a number of recipes for Drupal search engine optimization, but the Basic Drupal SEO Optimization guide is quite good.

Now it's hard to say exactly why we've got this ranking, but wanted to contribute a few things that have helped. OpenConcept uses the Drupal xml sitemap module so that we can submit sitemaps of our content to Google on a very regular basis. Recently Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have agree on standardizing on this format, Microsoft doesn't seem to have any way to submit these to their search engine.

We submit sitemaps and rss feeds of our clients sites to Google and Yahoo so that we can ensure that these search engines are receiving this information correctly.

We also provide the urllist module for search engines, although this has been depreciated since Yahoo started accepting Google's sitemap format. URLlist provides a list of all links to your content so that a search engine doesn't have to spier your whole site.

We do use pathauto module, and try to make sure that the URLs for our sites do contain human readable links that help search terms rank their results. Providing a relevant topic certainly helps too. Having clean urls (no question marks) also helps.

We do have a few associated websites which are linking to OpenConcept's news feeds as well as our client's Back-End, eORG, eRA, OpenOffice, ox.ca, PopEd, & prax.ca. Having external links, particularly to new content always helps. There are also a few domains being redirected to our site because the campaign has ended.

However, the biggest single thing that seems to be contributing is that we have been participating more in the blogosphere, producing more links in to our site. As per most blogs we have ours enabled with both rss feeds and comments. This allows people to both contribute relevant content (through moderate postings) and. view updates a their convenience. We are also posting on other blogs, and ensuring that we includes links back to OpenConcept.

The basic statistics module that comes with Drupal core is useful for tracking referrers, but I've found that the search keywords module is much more useful to figuring out what the search engines are sending your way. I provided a small patch to the statistics.module to make it easier to see long URLs and another patch to search keywords allowing users to search for keywords.

As search engines strive for ever more fresh content blogging is starting to be known for "Better Listening on Google". Since we started posting regular blog articles, we are getting many more unsolicited calls for our services.

If you need help setting up a blog for your organization, please let us know!.