Nearly 8 years ago, content management systems [CMS] became effective and affordable for most all web applications, from enterprise down to websites with just a few pages. This was a significant improvement to the way websites are created and maintained over the static HTML pages that preceeded it and any website that is currently not using a content management system is going to be lost in the dust created by those who do use a CMS.

Further democratization of the internet is now being promoted by Google in three significant ways that will make any website the best website it can possibly be for its stakeholders, using technology that was formerly only available to those who could afford it. These three utilities are now offered to interested users for free. Not only are they well-documented with tips and pointers, but they are relatively painless to install.

The final ingredient that makes this all work together is content. You have to have decent content to track, optimize and submit to search engines. And it has to be managed by a CMS. And it has to give your visitors some measue of what we call "tangibility" or a sense of what the person, place or thing is like you are promoting with a website.

	Content Management System [Drupal]
	Google Anaytics Tracking program
	Google Website Optimizer
	XML Sitemap
	Tangible Content

One of the earliest aspects of having a website in the late 20th century was, if you would put the effort in, you could have a website that looked as good as the "big" websites being created for large commercial enterprises. In other words, it became hard to tell if a company or institution behind a website was large or small by its website.

This is less true today than it was nine years ago. Today, the big commercial enterprises are able to buy expensive, proprietary content management systems, then hire marketing firms to optimize their websites for search engines along with running focus group tests to determine exactly which content appealed to which constituencies.

In most cases today, you can tell that a website is representing a small organization, company or firm over a larger one. How? By the single criterion that you can't find what you are looking for.

However, with the FIVE SILVER BULLETS mentioned above, any website can become a leader in its own category and KILL its competition.

As the old joke goes : what's worse? ... having Herpes or having a condo? Someday, there will be a scientific breakthrough and you'll be able to get rid of Herpes. What could be a better test for search engine placement than a real estate website in an historically depressed market?

Using just THREE of the SILVER BULLETS above [Drupal CMS, XML Sitemap and Tangible Content], we were able to create two different condo websites in different parts of the metro, both getting very similar results in the search engines.

Type in "condos in hopkins mn" and Marketplaceandmain.com comes up #2 in the non-sponsored search results. Type in "condos in brooklyn park mn" and VillageCreekCondosMN.com comes up #1.

Each SILVER BULLET provided its own contribution to this success, likely in equal parts. Drupal organizes page code so that it's easier for search engines to catalog the content, moving the formatting code below the content/copy code. Drupal also makes it very easy to install an XML sitemap, that produces a sitemap not for visitors but for search engines.

And finally and most astonishingly, the tangible content on this site is a rare example among real estate development websites. Go to any other real estate websites and you'll find very little information about the surrounding area or community. No information about the city, its citizens, its holidays, programs, schools, churches, etc. And certainly no high resolution photos depicting any of that! However, you'll find all of that and more on the two case study examples exposed here.

Why isn't MarketplaceandMain.com #1? Some SEO "enthusiasts" like to use tricks and gimmicks that help their websites crawl to the top rank in search engines. There are many of these but one of the most basic is to repeat a key word in the text copy a million times. The house.info #1 winner in our "condos in hopkins mn" case study has the word "Hopkins" listed 15 times in a short paragraph ---

Outside of making the text copy sound like nonsense, it gives any visitor the impression that there is something stronger than coffee being ingested by the people behind this website.

By way of contrast, here is the opening paragraph from the MarketplaceandMain.com website:

The text copy in the example above actually makes sense. No cheating involved with this one and it's ranked above all others except the top example that obviously cheated. Our point: real content plus real copy equals real tangibility and high search engine rankings. The VillageCreekCondosMN.com example used the same methods and came in #1. So this is no fluke.

As a final piece of information about the benefits of using the Drupal version of XML sitemap: when you update the website that has the XML sitemap installed, it can notifiy the search engines automatically, giving them notice to "send out the bots!"

As we mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is one of the more powerful tracking programs since it seems to take the web server log files that all web servers collect and organize them in ways that make it easy for the non-technical types to understand and act on. The Map overlay [or the Geolocation visualization] is one of the most interesting visualizations offered by Google Analytics where the webmaster can see from which state or country the visitors are coming.

Another mind-boggling visualization that Google Analytics performs is the Click Patterns "site overlay" in the Content Overview section. This is where you can take a web page and Google Analytics will overlay the percentage of total clicks each link has on that page. Up until this program came out, only high-end tracking programs offered this level of visualization and analysis.

Seeing the Click Patterns, makes you wonder how you would emphasize one more important menu item over a lesser one...this leads to the the Google Web Optimizer utility where you can do just that. With Web Optimizer, you can set up a user test using the utility where you can test one homepage over another version [or several others] to get the desired goal [more clicks on "request info" for example]. In other words, you can set up your own focus group of your real visitors, then get the results and act on them, just like the big enterprise websites do!

These 5 SILVER BULLETS are not cheap to install since you will have to pay an expert to do so but they are affordable to ANY website owner who is serious about having a website. The good news is that they are sure fire methods to insure your website will be a success AND the software behind them [a very considerable expense if you compare with the proprietary world of $oftware] is FREE and supported by top-level organizations with a worldwide following.

-Tim Corwin
 December, 2008