SEO Blueprints

On my first sites, I used a webpage editing program and designed my site page by page. When I wanted to make a change in the menu, I had to go through each page and make sure to make the menu change exactly the same. Small changes would take twenty to sixty minutes sometimes. Life became a lot easier when I switched to using a content management system (CMS).

Wordpress is the best CMS for blogs. It’s free, widely supported, easy to use, and has all the of functionality you need (especially with all the plugins the users create for it.) Wordpress was the first CMS I used and it was great for the first blog sites I managed.

Now though I want to make more sites organized by content than organized by time. With a blog, people generally just read the most recent posts. Unless you have a popular blog, or have a post with a lot of reference material, the traffic for the older posts fades away. Additionally, a high traffic blog requires a relatively large amount of time dedicated to it. There a lots of blogs to compete with and infrequent or poor quality posting will kill your traffic.

If you want a site with less maintenance and more potential for a long term income, you need content that lasts a fair amount of time. Reference material and articles on larger themes are better suited for this. Organization of this material is important so people can understand and navigate your site with ease, but also so the search engines index your site with high traffic search terms.

For example, if you have a site about horse breeding, you would want a menu and set of pages for different kinds of horses, another menu and separate set for tips for keeping a healthy horse, etc. Doing this in a time organized CMS wouldn’t make sense. You’d have everything in the form of dated posts, and you would need new tips on a regular basis.

The CMS one should use for this type of site is Drupal rather than Wordpress. Drupal allows the webmaster to easily create and rearrange menus, add content, make menu trees, insert stories (articles), and make an organizational layout that users would appreciate.

This is a website using Drupal: Ecademy.
My site (this one) uses Wordpress.

You would go to my homepage when you want to see the most recent posts I wrote. But for a site like Ecademy you could easily spend a few minutes surfing around the site to see what is has, and you might go back to the homepage to check out the featured articles, or any of the other information offered. Because of this type of layout, Ecademy gets more page views, and also more ad impressions in places where people are likely to click.

In short, they are both great but different products. Use Wordpress when you want to make a blog or time organized site. But, if you are doing a site covering many different categories and providing reference type of information, Drupal is a far better choice.

Wordpress strengths vs Drupal: More templates, more plugins, easier to use, easier to customize, more widely used and supported.

Drupal strengths vs Wordpress: Admin control panel much more powerful, organization options more advanced, still very widely supported. Drupal has a content revision tool that lets you switch back to older versions of pages. Some call Drupal more of a CMF (content management framework) with a out-of-box CMS.

Both of them: Open source, use PHP & MySQL, SEO friendly, allow plugins, lots of support information available.

Note: This recommendation is for people not intending to do a major programming overhaul of the CMS (either because they don’t want to or don’t know how.) Both CMS’s can be used for both types of organization and are fully customizable, but since the vast majority of users will not do major programming changes, I chose to evaluate them on the ‘out-of-box’ version.

Filed under: CMS, Wordpress, Drupal