SEO

You've made an investment into your organization's most important marketing tool - your website. But what good is an amazing site if your target audience isn't finding it? Google's algorithms have become much more advanced. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and link buying to reach the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Eight seconds. That’s not a whole lot of time at all. But that’s the average attention span of the typical internet user (fun fact - it’s one second less than a goldfish’s). What does that mean for us marketers? We now have even less time to engage our target audience before they scroll down their timelines and forget the messages we’ve invested countless hours on crafting. Now is the time to spend time grabbing your prospective client’s attention both visually AND audibly through your YouTube channel.

Google provides a number of different free tools to help users improve their SEO and drive more traffic to their websites. Chances are you may already be familiar with Google Analytics, Google’s popular and widely used analytics tools suite. When it comes to your SEO arsenal, however, don’t overlook Google Webmaster Tools! Google Webmaster Tools is a free, easy to use toolkit from Google that will help your website be found online.

Senior Digital Strategist Dawn Borglund gave a brief talk at Drupalcon 2014 in Austin updating companies on what's going on in Search Engine Optimization and providing a few quick wins organizations can start implementing today. 

Though less tangible than workflows and presentation, giving attention to website performance is vital both during development and post-launch.  By scheduling time to establish parameters pre-launch and periodically checkingperformance post-launch, the chances of being caught flat-footed by unexpected traffic or bugs can be minimized.  As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure.”

Creating a website with dazzling effects is only great if someone finds it, needs it and is compelled to take the next step with your company. Here are some quick tips to get boost your traffic, so your website starts working for you. 

1. SEO: Be where your users are looking. 

I love search engine optimization because it’s an easy way to talk with the people who are already interested in what you offer or at least interested enough to do some research on it. This way you’re not working with a completely cold lead. 

If you’ve stumbled upon this blog, you probably already know the basics about Drupal. The sales pitch I usually hear starts with: it’s a powerful CMS, free, open source, and has a great community of developers powering it. Those statements are all true, but I like to believe that Drupal is much more than that. So I started researching, interviewing the team here at Mediacurrent, and came up with this list of 15 cool things you (probably) don’t know about Drupal - especially if you're new to the community. 

I got involved with Drupal in 2007 when I decided I wanted to build an online community of young people interested in politics in order to encourage their interest and activism. I was in way over my head; I had dabbled with a number of desktop programming languages, but I had never built a website. I got my first hosting account on my dad's recommendation, and it came with an installer for a large number of open-source software in a variety of categories.