Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

Perhaps the single most important feature that Drupal or CivicSpace offer for search engine optimization is the ability to create clean URLs. This feature alone is enough to warrant the switch from Mambo, and is probably the most important SEO option a true CMS can offer.

One of the key factors in your search engine optimization strategy is referrers. Referrers are the websites that are sending users to your site.

If all of your website visitors visit your site by typing in your homepage's URL directly, then your only referrer is yourself. However, if that were the case, you wouldn't need to optimize Drupal for the search engines at all.

Since search engine optimization / marketing (referred to as SEO or SEM) is both an interest of mine and a requirement for my sites, it was natural that I looked for strong search engine optimization options built-in when I was looking for a CMS.

Nonprofits often don't realize that they can excel in another area, too: in the quality of their inbound links. Search Engine Optimizers have known for years that simply having links pointing to your sites isn't enough...it's the quality of those links that counts, more than anything else.

This is one area nonprofits truly excel in. While businesses often resort to hiring professional content writers to fill out the content on their websites, nonprofits as a rule tend to have real, valuable, related content on their sites. A business might have a vested interest (usually search engine rankings, ironically) in fluffing their sites out with extra content, but nonprofits tend to focus on their content first and on their search engine rankings later.