Content Management Systems Compared
By David Golding
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A hugely important task to maintaining a quality web site that gets good levels of traffic and high rankings in search engines is a steady stream of useful content. Perhaps the best example of this is Wikipedia. Because it is user-generated, millions of articles are updated daily. Their entire collection is one of the most useful sources for information available and is also one of the most scalable databases on top of that. The system itself, though, would be impossible without some powerful content management applications.
If you’ve never been exposed to a content management system of any kind, well, you’re looking at one. This entire web site is customized using several tools and raw scripts that make it possible for me to maintain the content of this site. To generate all the HTML for each update would be too tedious and time-consuming.
But what content management system to use? Deciding on one can be a costly investment in either time or money, or both. I will offer my recommendations, but the only way to truly know what works best is to demo each one separately.
Drupal
I’m a fan of Drupal because of its structure. You can design nodes, individual elements that serve custom purposes. It also behaves well with templates and permissions so that you can have others with less access privileges edit specified areas of content. The security is as good as anything else I’ve seen, and it’s open source which makes it free and up-to-date.
WordPress
For blogging, the best I’ve used is WordPress. It’s actually very easy to install if you’ve ever installed a PHP program before. And it’s got a beautiful administrator’s panel that makes blogging easy. It’s possible, and I’ve seen it done, to use WordPress as a content management system on top of blogging. In this regard, I think it’s quite powerful, but you may need to know some HTML to get it to work professionally.
CMS Matrix
CMS Matrix lists dozens of content management systems and lets you compare all the features. After giving one CMS a try, you can refer to this site to make solid comparisons.
Google Links
By David Golding
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Ever wonder how many links you ought to shoot for when optimizing for Google’s search engine? Well, I’ve been working on a program that can analyze that for you. It’s in beta version, but you ought to be able to toy around with it enough for it to be useful.
Google Links Tool retrieves a random sample of web sites for a given query and gives you the actual count of links picked up by Google. You’ll have to keep the number of results low, or otherwise the program will crash on you (i.e. 20 or less). But you can repeat the process for large samples, I suppose.
Anyway, I hope you give it a test drive. Randomized sampling can be powerful and this will save you time when trying to gather data from Google.
Quality Linking Strategies
By David Golding
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I recently posted on how linking doesn’t affect ranking in Google’s engine. My research shows that there exists no correlation between quantity of links and rank position for any given keyphrase. However, in this post, I’d like to pick up where I left off and discuss quality linking strategy.
Quality of links is vital to your site’s rank in Google’s search engine. Here’s how you can tell quality of other sites’ links. Wikipedia has an article on how Google’s PageRank system works. In general, Google considers links from other websites like we’d consider votes; when I link to a site, I’m casting a vote in favor of that site. The more that legitimate human beings with intelligence and know-how vote on a particular site, the more relevance is assigned to it, therefore pushing the ranking higher. This understanding of Google’s algorithm has led many to believe that all you have to do is run around gaining links from people.
I don’t discourage that. Links drive traffic and they are always a good idea. But nine times out of ten, you will have limited resources: budget, manpower, expertise, etc. You will have to make trade-offs. When a trade-off appears, don’t sacrifice quality of links for quantity.
My rule of thumb: put together your marketing strategy for your organization using sound principles. Think of things you would do offline to drive traffic. Once there’s a coherent marketing strategy in place, it’s much easier to adapt that strategy to the internet. For example, one strategy would be to create a newsletter on a bi-monthly basis. Okay, well, just find a way to publish that newsletter on the web as well. Another idea is to build a large network of contacts. Have you heard of LinkedIn? What if direct mail is your promotional strategy? Well, reference your site in the ad and run some online ads with the same message. You’ll find that as you participate on the internet as a live citizen, the links will come. And as your site builds and grows and is able to offer a legitimate online contribution, visitors will find value and link back to it in one way or another.
There are some other targeted linking strategies. If you’ve run into a wall, give me a buzz.
