This week I changed my focus with the Volacci SEO blog: fewer posts, deeper thoughts. While there will now be only three posts a week (M/W/F), the posts will be longer, more insightful, and, hopefully, more valuable to you. With so much news occurring in and around both the Drupal and SEO communities every day, I want to bring both worlds together in a verbal Venn diagram of sorts each Friday for you to easily digest. And I will call this informational hybrid: This week in Drupal SEO News.
DRUPAL NEWS
If you aren’t familiar with Lullabot by now, shame on you! They are only THE consulting and training company for all things Drupal. Basically, they are Drupal experts. So it comes as no surprise when Lullabot made some big announcements recently.
Drupal Powers Video
Last Friday, Lullabot announced the launch of its latest project: Ignite Talks
The project was produced for O’Reilly Media and features a Drupal-powered video portal for Ingite’s archive of 5-minute videos from their events from around the globe. The site also supports live video streaming of events as well.
How it works: Videos are featured on the homepage for your viewing pleasure and organized according to their unique properties. Search through videos by location, event, popularity, chronology, or video tags to find the ones you want to watch. Each city also has its own landing page, with its own subsequent archives as well, and there is ~70 cities to choose from.
The closest city I found to Austin was Dallas. We’ll let it go this time...
Rapid Waters Team Joins Lullabot
Like I said before, Lullabot is making moves! On Monday they announced that Rapid Waters Development is joining Lullabot. Before Monday, Rapid Waters was a Drupal-focused development company, founded by Jerad Bitner and David Burns, that did some fantastic work for Sony Music, MothersClick, and, most recently, IgniteShow.com. (Coincidence? I think not.)
This melding of Drupal development expertise makes even the most avid Voltron fans envious!
With the Drupal wizardry Bitner and Burns bring with them, Lullabot now has a new development division that has the capacity for “more complete Drupal solutions.”
TopNotchThemes Launches New Fusion Themes Site
This past Tuesday, expert Drupal-themers, TopNotchThemes, launched its Fusion-themed website.
Appropriately deemed “The next generation in Drupal Themes”, Fusion was already being used by over 4,000 sites before it made it out of beta. It’s basically the LeBron James of Drupal themes, while TopNotchThemes is the Michael Jordan of Drupal theming. It looks as if tons of Drupal movers and shakers were there to lend a helping hand and cheer on Stephanie Pakrul and other TopNotchThemers, and for that Volacci would like to say THANK YOU!
Please check them out at the link above the Fusion logo.
SEARCH NEWS
Google Adds ‘Nearby’ Search
Last Friday Google introduced a way to filter search results based on its user’s location. There is now a ‘Nearby’ tool in the Search Options panel that will allow you to refine your search. Just enter a search query, click on ‘search options’ and select ‘nearby’. You can supply your location or a different one - depending on where you are headed. Pick out a restaurant to take your parents when you visit them next. Plan out a dinner with a client at your next out-of-town conference.
For local businesses, this only furthers the need for registration in Google Local. If you can’t be found on Google Maps, then you aren’t going to benefit from this. This is one of the most basic steps toward local search success.
Google’s SEO Report Card
How many web pages use a descriptive title tag? Meta tags? Heading tags? These are the types of questions Google asked itself in order to produce, to my knowledge, their first SEO Report Card.
The Report Card itself is 50 pages of self-critique, red marks, and we-can-do-better’s. They graded the main pages of 100 different Google products and measured them across a dozen common optimization categories, including: search result presentation, URLs and redirects, and on-page optimization.
The purpose of this self-critique is to not only help the search engines understand online content better, but to improve user experience with the Google search engine. I applaud Google for showing everyone how they measure up to SEO best practices. It always help the morale of the common folk when the king shows he is human as well.
You only improve when you learn from your mistakes. But its hard to learn when you don’t know what your mistakes actually are. Want to test your own SEO mettle against SEO best practices? This is a good place to start.
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