Web­site migra­tion is most com­mon devel­op­ment ser­vices offered by web devel­op­ment com­pa­nies. Let us first of all dis­cuss fea­tures and ben­e­fits of dynamic websites.

Dynamic web­site keep you tuned with real updates, your web­site is active and syn­chro­nized with other activ­i­ties online; all under your con­trol. Search engine always look for fresh con­tent on your web­site, make sure one or the other activ­ity keeps going on your web­site; if there is no activ­ity on your web­site for a long time search engine may remove it from its index.

We are sure if you look few years back, web­sites were sta­tic and all the changes were to be done by devel­op­ers, user have to wait for admin and admin sent it to devel­oper and it was a long pro­ce­dure with pro­fes­sion­als involved at dif­fer­ent steps.

With evolve­ment of new tools and advance­ment in tech­nol­ogy, web appli­ca­tions and con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem came up. In the present age, tech­nolo­gies like RoR, Web 2.0 and LAMP have gifted us with dynamic web­sites. Dynamic web­site helps to make instant updat­ing of ongo­ing activ­i­ties of the orga­ni­za­tion, pro­vid­ing the cur­rent real time data. Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) helps web admin­is­tra­tor to con­trol your web­site con­tent (cre­ate cat­e­gories, files, audio, video, doc­u­ments, elec­tronic file, etc.). With­out designer and devel­oper involve­ment, a per­son with­out knowl­edge of CMS can start up, no need to learn. CMS is user friendly, ease to imple­ment, pro­vides scal­able solutions.

Ben­e­fits of dynamic web­sites can be briefed: Real time con­tent manip­u­la­tion, num­ber of users with secure login area, priv­i­leged users, pag­ing nav­i­ga­tion, forums, blogs, detail site traf­fic report.

Most of the open source CMS are writ­ten using script­ing lan­guages like PHP and uses MySQL data­base. For each dynamic page gen­er­ated these script­ing lan­guages cre­ate a unique link with ses­sion id vari­ables to keep record of vis­i­tors block­ing cook­ies; so there is unique link URL for each page accessed with strings and char­ac­ter sets like ?=!. From SEO point of view you need to remove these char­ac­ters from the URL to push your rank­ing for­ward, for the pages gen­er­ated dynam­i­cally we can go ahead by URL rewrit­ing, this can be achieved by turn­ing off the ses­sion id and turn­ing on cook­ies in .ini file or by writ­ing .HTACCESS file.

For devel­op­ing a search engine friendly web­site using open source CMS we need to study well the require­ments of the web­site to be devel­oped and func­tion­al­i­ties offered by the off-the-shelf-applications. We have few rea­sons to state why Dru­pal CMS is most pre­ferred com­pared to Joomla and other open source CMS for devel­op­ing search engine web­sites. Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem helps to develop more inter­ac­tive web­site, user friendly inter­face that will help to deliver scal­able solu­tions com­pared to sta­tic web­sites devel­oped using HTML. These CMS pro­vides a mod­u­lar approach, cat­e­go­riza­tion of con­tent, easy man­age­ment of web­site design and con­tent, updat­ing at one point is reflected through­out, data­base is main­tained sep­a­rately, no spe­cific knowl­edge is required for using CMS; these all together makes CMS highly scalable.

Views may dif­fer and we wel­come my arti­cle read­ers to post com­ments, as it is view that Dru­pal is best for search engine web­site devel­op­ment. Dru­pal is very pow­er­ful and can be used to develop web­sites of high degree com­plex­ity. Web­sites devel­oped in Dru­pal are AOL, Yahoo, Aaron Wall’s SEObook.com, Forbes, The United Nations, The Onion, The Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, Warner Broth­ers Records, Lime.com, The New York Observer, And Fast Company.

Why Dru­pal for SEO?

Tax­on­omy — The mod­u­lar struc­ture of CMS works best with Dru­pal allows cat­e­go­riz­ing con­tent, orga­niz­ing and man­ag­ing it more accu­rately by tag­ging. Based on the theme of cat­e­gories are formed and tags are assigned. Few cat­e­gories may allow user to assign tags as per ones choice; at the same few cat­e­gories may allow to tag by offer­ing selected, exist­ing tags, com­pletely flex­i­ble. Hier­ar­chy of cat­e­gories is also fol­lowed if required. You can also have hier­ar­chi­cal cat­e­gories, with sin­gle or mul­ti­ple par­ent cat­e­gories. The most impor­tant point to be con­sid­ered is advanced tax­on­omy fea­tures allow to tar­get long-tail keywords.

Advanced URL Con­trol — Manip­u­late the URL struc­ture eas­ily with Dru­pal. Each item in Dru­pal is node that can be assigned a cus­tom URL, an alias URL. Con­struct clean URL with Dru­pal, all the inter­nal URLs are redi­rected (301) to custom.

Cus­tom Con­tent Types and Views — Using Con­tent Con­struc­tion Kit (CCK) and Views Mod­ules new con­tent types can be cre­ated and advance cus­tom views can also be cre­ated with­out writ­ing code. N num­ber of con­tent types can be cre­ated and can be dis­played in n-number of ways. Exam­ples: forum posts, blog posts, clas­si­fied ads, etc.

Revi­sion Con­trol — Con­fig­ur­ing Dru­pal lets you keep track of older and new ver­sions if needed while edit­ing web pages.

User Man­age­ment — For com­mu­nity based web­sites Dru­pal is the best solu­tion that has a func­tion­al­ity that helps con­trol user access. . Dif­fer­ent cus­tom user role with vary­ing degree of access lev­els: like web­mas­ter, admin, mod­er­a­tor, etc. You can cus­tomize your web­site by adding or delet­ing fea­tures like blogs.

Page Titles and Meta Tags — It is sim­ple and easy to man­age Meta tags ele­ments and HTML ele­ments using spe­cific mod­ules of meta tags control.

Tem­plate: Them­ing in Dru­pal is eas­ier, it uses PHP Tem­plate, Dru­pal Theme Developer’s Guide is a good resource.

Excel­lent Doc­u­men­ta­tion — Excel­lent doc­u­men­ta­tion is avail­able with Dru­pal and I am sure once you install Dru­pal you can easy go with it. Rich doc­u­men­ta­tion on mas­sive API ref­er­ence, blogs, hand­books, tuto­ri­als, video; also Dru­pal Dojo com­mu­nity is of great help for developers.

Dru­pal Cook­books — If you fur­ther want to cus­tomize your Dru­pal solu­tion, you can ful­fill your need by using code snip­pet avail­able with Drupal.org.

Large and Friendly Com­mu­nity — We believe Dru­pal is the best open source CMS solu­tion for devel­op­ing search engine friendly web­sites. The Dru­pal developer’s com­mu­nity is expand­ing and you can find lots of com­mu­nity cre­ated mod­ules. If get struck up with some prob­lem, you can join Dru­pal forums and users will try to solve your prob­lem, by pro­vid­ing best pos­si­ble solu­tion and answers.

Join Dru­pal com­mu­nity to learn how you can pro­mote and make your Dru­pal web­sites search engine friendly, we at Dru­pal Devel­oper India com­pany offer Dru­pal con­sult­ing, Dru­pal instal­la­tion, wide range of Dru­pal PHP tem­plates, Dru­pal cus­tomiza­tion, Dru­pal devel­op­ment, Dru­pal Devel­oper and main­te­nance of your Dru­pal website.