Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…

I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.

it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.

We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.

The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don’t do SEO…, YOU do SEO…

That is right, they don’t do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!

You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.

None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.

That is all up to you.

None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.

They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community’s, but they still remain content management systems.

They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.

The deciding factor for great search engine optimization

It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!

Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.

You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!

So don’t blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Why Joomla, WordPress and Drupal all Fail at Search Engine Optimization an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Yet another great post from Smashing Magazine, this time Glen Stansberry wrote post reviewing of 10 Weblog Engines among them WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!

Af course they included MovableType and ExpressionEngine which I also tried but didn’t like that much.

Looking and writing about the following aspects of each engine:

• Programming language.
• What features you’ll need.
• The size of the software’s community.
• The age of the software.
• If you are planning on extending the Blog.

For Programming language my favorite is PHP, Like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! (and Typo3)
Features are within the core or easily integrated with Extensions like Components,  Plugins and/or Modules.
Both these Blogging platforms have very good community to support you, although Joomla! is the biggest at this moment.
Age for me is really not much of an issue but for you looking at the first release dates…
WordPress started in 2003, Drupal in 2001 and Joomla! in 2005 as a fork from Mambo that was build from 2000 (Open source Dual license in 2001)
Extending your "Blog" is really easy with all the packages I favor.

Focus on Blogging

But when it comes to Blogging, WordPress works best for me and in the Smashing magazine post Glen wrote one simple statement under Drupal and extend it later on to Joomla!
        "it’s not just blogging software. Drupal is community software. "
Which is exactly how I see it…
You can use Joomla! for Blogging and with Drupal you can do the same thing, but I just don’t like the Drupal control panel that much to write blogposts.

One other great article comparing Drupal and Joomla  mentioned in the post is from Steve (Hope you get a lot of traffic from this Smashing magazine article!)  over at Alledia on Joomla and Drupal.(Needs an Update since the release of Joomla 1,5 ;-)

All in all, a nice overview of the Blogging Engine landscape of today from Smashing Magazines, and for me its good to see that Joomla now is also considered a Blogging Platform although still with some limitations.
But those limitations can be overcome with the right setting and Blogging Components for Joomla.

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Blogging, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress

You are reading Weblog engines reviewed by Smashing magazine an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Today I read a Report from Water & Stone, a big name in the Mambo community as one of there Templates is a great looking one with a lot of installations.

The report (which you can download here) brings numbers and conclusions on Market shares of Open Source CMS like Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and many others like e107,Typo3, Modx, Elgg en more…

In the report there are clearly three Big names in Open Source CMS, not that we did not know who the leaders are, but Rik Shreves does a great job by bringing in the numbers to proof it!

What is strange to me was that Twitter users tend to write more on WordPress and Drupal than on Joomla!, Where are the Joomla Twitters?

I also like the Search Engine Ranking research on page 17, on which Joomla! and Drupal score big time, but WordPress is nowhere in sight for the search terms that contain CMS.
Clearly WordPress is still mostly seen as an Blogging platform instead of a Content Management System like Joomla and Drupal.

In the conclusion pages of the report there is also a section about the future of some projects like Mambo en CMSMadeSimple as well upcoming systems like Elgg and Modx.

Get the download and read the report, it is well written with lots of graphs and gives an insight of what the market in Open Source CMS is right now!

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, WordPress

You are reading Water & Stone Reporting on Open Source CMS Market 2008 an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

First off, search engine friendly is not the same as search engine optimized!
This is something Joost de Valk already wrote about in his post Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Search engine optimization does go a lot further then making a search engine friendly website, and building a Content Management system for websites that is search engine optimized…, that is just not possible…

What is possible is to look at the search engine friendliness of three popular Open Source CM systems.
Basics for this comparison are the options necessary that are in the system itself and not those things that can by done with Content, Images, Layout or other aspects.
So no info about H1 or H2, no alt or title tags for images and more.
No, you can read here about:

• The possibility to influence the HTML title separate from the content title
• The possibility to use the Metatags like Description and Keywords on individual content items
• Create search engine friendly URLs, preferably with keywords in it, or other wise with as little possible use of parameters like id_?=12 or similar.

For all three system’s the comparison is with the following technical hosting specification:

• Linux (UNIX) based hosting
• PHP 4 or PHP 5
• Apache webserver with Mod_Rewrite active

WordPress, Drupal en Joomla

WordPress

• URL Rewrite is easy to realize with the ”Permalink” option, WordPress can set the right .htaccess options in the file if the file is writable. My own mostly used option is to use the custom option /%postname%/ with which the post title is also the URL. You can change the URL by changing the text in the “Post Slug” option.
• Title is naturally  the standard title of your post, but you want more control on the option for search engine, that is why your could use the  SEO Title tag plugin with just a minor change in your template.
• Metatags in a basic WordPress installation there is no possibility to change the ”Description” and ”Keywords” per post or page. With the All-in-one-SEO-Pack plugin you will have all these options. You can also change the Title with this plugin, but I like the overview and options that SEO Title tag will give you.
  You can use both plugins at the same time if you disable the title rewrite option in All-in-one-SEO-Pack

Tip: Use the optional excerpt function to generate the Meta description, that will also give you better archive pages, since most of the templates use that data for the archive page creation.

Drupal

• URL rewrite in Drupal you need to use the site configuration option “Clean URLs” that also can change your .htaccess file if it is writable. But that just changes your URL to /node/1/ instead off q=1. And you need more…. That is why you need to install the ”pathauto” module and you activate the modules “path” and “pathauto”.
• Title this is just as with the other just the title of your content item, but with the Page Title module you just have a little more control about the title tag, but not a lot.
• Metatags in the standard installation of Drupal this option is also not available, but with the Meta Tags Nodeword module you will get that possibility.

Tip: Set in the Pathauto module in the general settings the option at “Update action” to “Do Nothing” with this option you will later have the possibility to change the title without changing the URL.

Joomla 1.0

• URL rewrite in version 1.0.x of Joomla there is an SEO option in the main configuration screen, a standard htaccess.txt file is included in the package en needs to be renamed to .htaccess. With this option enabled URLs are made on the base of ID numbers like Domain-name/12/25/3/, but here you also want more… that is why you should install a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will give you much better URLs. And it will give you a good 404 error page that will also uses a proper 404 header. (Joomla standard will give an 200 OK and redirects you to the Homepage…)
• Title with the same SEF component you will get the opportunity to use the title alias function for you URL so you can use your normal article title for you optimization. For an optimal use of titles, and also for your menu items, you can use the SEF Patch of Joomlatwork , there is also a paid version that will give you a separate HTML Title option for more control like the WordPress SEO Title plugin.
• Metatags the description and keyword options are already in a standard Joomla incorporated for each article, but not for menu items, you will have to get the above mentioned SEF Patch to use that.

Tip: Choose with any SEF component you use alway the option /category/title and not /section/category/title to get a little shorter URLs. /title/ alone is also a possibility but not as good, because you can run into trouble like things like /Drupal/installation manual.HTML and /WordPress/installation manual.HTML (Drupal en WordPress are here been used as categories)

Joomla 1.5

• URL Rewrite is in Joomla 1.5 done with the SEO settings in your Global configuration, but you have now three options, unfortunately in each of those options, there is always an item ID number in the URL.
  • SEF on, will give you directly URLs with the title in it, but with index.php in the URL. (can also be used on windows hosting)
  • SEF with the use of .htaccess, this will also give you the URL with title, but than without the index.php
  • Use suffix, this options sets a .HTML at the end of your URL
  • Attention! Joomla 1.5 uses the title alias, but you have to set the ”-” between the words in your URL options, otherwise you will get a %20% in your URL if you leave it blank.
• Title here Joomla will use the standard article title, if your want more control, than you can use the new Joomla 1.5 SEF patch from Joomlatwork.com (Dutchies ;-)) and I have to add here that Richard of Joomlatwork already has stated that the SEF patch will be update with each release until it is in the Joomla core!
  If you use the SEF patch you get an extra SEO tab in your configuration screen, don’t forget to set the minimal [TITLE] option, otherwise your title will show your URL as title.
• Metatags are also like the “old” Joomla version built-in for articles and site wide via your Global configuration. But like with the old version, here is the same advice to get more control use the SEF patch of Joomlatwork.com .

Tip: For both versions of Joomla versions an advice, do not use the Global Metatag settings! With version 1.0.x you will get the text of the Globals on top of the page Metatags which will leave you with pretty much the same Metatags in the search engines as snippets, version 1.5 does this a lot better, and will not fill it with the standard if you use the page description.However is does set this if the page description is empty…

Conclusion: None of the three is out-of-the-box ready as search engine friendly Content Management system. With all three there needs to be done some extra work to realize the desired options.

For me they all have there own usage:

• WordPress works great for smaller websites and even bigger Blogs
• Joomla is fine for SMB websites and, with some extra extensions can be used for bigger sites as well.
  Especially the easy and user friendliness is great for less “technical” webmasters.
• Drupal can do almost everything, but for me is somewhat staying behind the others because of the lack of user friendliness for those who have the maintain and edit the page content.

But the most important factor in the choice of system is still what your customer wants and the ease of use for him/her… if the site has to become a success, then it must by their website, and to achieve that they have to be able to easily maintain the site themselves!
For search engine optimization…, well, that is why there are specialists, those who will look at the details… and each of them will have there own preferences for a certain system.

O yes, tips and  other options… the comments are open :-)

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, SEF, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Search Engine Friendly? A WordPress, Joomla and Drupal Comparison. an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

In my last post I told you about the Joomla! winning the Best PHP Open Source CMS, and that they were in the running for overall winner of the Packt Publishing contest.

They came in second after last years victory.

This year the overall winner is Drupal, which is one of the four Open Source Content management systems I use, so I am pleased with this one as well!

Drupal is more a kind off framework with wicht you can accomplish more special tasks that with Joomla!, although the new 1.5 version is also going to be more framework based.

Congratulations to the people of Drupal !! and make sure you check out the Other finalist at Packt Publishing

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Drupal

You are reading Drupal before Joomla! an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther