Courtesy of OSTraining

After eight years on the market, Drupal core version 6.X reached end-of-life (EOL) status in February 2016. In other words, the Drupal community and security team stopped working on new projects, updates, and bug fixes for version 6.

So what happened to more than 100,000 Drupal 6 sites? While some upgraded to Drupal 7 or migrated to Drupal 8, many stuck with Drupal 6. Today, more than one million Drupal sites exist — and of those, nearly 42,000 are still on Drupal 6.

With Drupal 9 being released in 2020, Drupal 7 will enter EOL status, further ostracizing Drupal 6 sites. Also, Drupal’s coding system (PHP) has been updated, and the code differences in different Drupal versions can negatively impact a site’s performance.

If you still have a Drupal 6 site, it may seem like the only option is to migrate to a newer version of Drupal, which is a big time and money investment. If you are in this situation, read on — here are two ways to keep your site relevant!

1. Preserve Your Site, Just the Way It Is

   If your site primarily “brochure-style”, with few or no future content updates required, we’d recommend downloading all of your web pages and then creating an HTML-based site. This maintains the content and theme of the site, but converts it into a static and durable version. Below is a list of benefits to this approach:

• Your site will no longer run on PHP, the code system that underpins Drupal. This means you won’t have to worry about PHP updates.
• Because the site will be HTML-based, all Drupal issues will disappear. Meanwhile, all content and client-side functionality remain the same.
• The site will be faster than before.
• This is the most budget-friendly method to preserving Drupal 6.

2. Refresh Your Site with WordPress

   If you haven’t updated your site since Drupal 6 reached EOL in 2016, chances are that it could use a refresh. Consider converting your website from Drupal 6 to the current version of WordPress. Here are some good reasons to consider going this route:

• You can preserve your site’s users, content, and interactive functionality while moving to one of the most popular CMSs.

Courtesy of Web Technology Surveys

WordPress powers more than a third of all websites. The prevalence of WordPress makes it easy to find skilled developers and new features.

• Migrating a Drupal 6 site to newer Drupal versions versus WordPress takes about the same amount of time and effort. Considering the level of adoption of WordPress over Drupal, migrating to WordPress makes more sense.
• The WordPress migration will improve your site’s performance, offering users a more inviting and efficient experience.
• You’ll be able to map your old URLs to new URLs and replicate the site reports (known as “Views” in Drupal).
• This refresh will make your site mobile-ready, whereas Drupal 6 is short on responsive themes and modules.

Courtesy of Philly Marketing Labs

As you can see, there are different approaches to preserving or refreshing your Drupal 6 site.

If you’re in the market for web development, check out Clutch, a B2B ratings and reviews platform. Clutch helps businesses connect with buyers, and vice versa. Clutch’s sister sites are also great resources: grow your presence on The Manifest, a business guide, and show off your portfolio on Visual Objects, which displays work from top creative firms around the world.

Shawn DeWolfe Consulting is pleased to be listed as a top Canadian web developer on Clutch and The Manifest. Contact us today if you want help with your Drupal 6 website, or have any other web design or development needs!

Header image courtesy of Acro Media

The post How to Keep Your Drupal 6 Website Relevant appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

Then I went to sleep in a sense and came back to find that my SEO perfection was dashed to the rocks. Along with it my decent Google Adsense trickle and my legion of fans. It wasn’t entirely my fault and maybe you’re in the same boat and we’re both out to sea.

Here’s what happened in the meantime:

• I had an ASP driven site that should have tied into more meta tag information and Search Engine friendliness than it did. That’s not Microsoft’s fault. CMSes were still nascent at that time, so I didn’t have a content management system I could download and make use of.
• The trends changed. When I first tried to gain the favour of search engines, Yahoo was the big game in town and Google was a phrase that was always coupled with “plex.” Google, the trend setter for search engines has changed again in the Summer of 2011 with what was called the “Panda” update. The algorithm was changed to leave content farms in a bad place. The tried and true concept of article marketing to proliferate your site links wasn’t going to work anymore.
• Facebook’s walled gardens rose up and blocked the light. If search engines cannot index content, it will not be be in their search results. I got suckered into the gaze of Sauron where it comes to social media. I put too much effort on adding material into Facebook. I saw others do this too. They would post solely in Facebook and I’d say: “whoa! How are people going to find that?” Even if inside of Facebook, there was a feeding frenzy for posts. Outside of Facebook, there were crickets. My site became one of those towns that gets abandoned when the Interstate is built and takes traffic away from town. Who cares what I put up on my billboard? What if I have the awesome slogan? No one is driving by.

  But sites still can be super popular. You can still make lots of money from the Internet: from pay-per-click advertising, from product sales and services. How does someone get that traffic off of the highway? You have to prepare for the traffic and make your site a welcoming stop.

  This is a long but awesome video:

  There are a number of precursor steps to being ready to cash in on SEO improvements:

  Your website needs to be capable of SEO improvements. For example, can you pop in meta data like keywords, description, Dublin Core elements, lat/long? How about the new stuff for OpenGraph? For Drupal, you need the NodeWords modules (warning: it cannot retain taxonomy settings or output them). For WordPress, the SEO All-in-One Pack is great to give WordPress SEO functionality.

  Your content needs to be found. Make links and make them available on your site. Your links should get you to all of your pages inside of a couple hops in any particular direction of links. Make sure your pages are not buried or hidden. If you have to link them from a kludgey page (like a taxonomy page), you have to give search engines something to chew on.

  Your terms need to be keyword dense and they need to be friendly to the long tail search concept.

  If you do customer research to find your customers, doing keyword research is a way to get your pages found. It’s the study of words that your potential clients use when searching for your service or product.

  Your initial cut of keyword research will find the crowded popular terms relevant to your pages. The people using those terms make up 3% of your potential audience. There’s an audience of people who need your services who know what they want but don’t know you have it because their keywords are not your keywords. That audience makes up 30% of the potential audience of customers. Which would you rather tap into? The crowded 3% or the roundabout 30%? The 3% are punch drunk from you and your competitors. The 30% have talked themselves into buying, but don’t know about you.

  • pick valid initial keywords from your own content
  • look at the terms used by your competitors
  • take the common keywords and look off target. For example, “Adidas” is too direct a target for users but people may search for “muddy running shoes” or “better tread wear” and be open to Adidas.
  • “Adidas” may be an expensive search term to buy if you were using AdWords or similar; but “better tread wear” could be very inexpensive to buy. A long list of uncommon terms hooking up with a long list of searchers will be more beneficial than crowded terms.

  After you have your good to get, off target keywords do two things with the knowledge:

  • first: go back to your hurting content and rewrite parts of it to bring those obscure terms that could reap big wins. Don’t toss all of your good crowded keywords. Keep some of them but spice up your text with material found in the long tail of valid keywords.
  • second: write new content geared to meet what your audience is really looking for when they seek out your products, services or snazzy info.

  Find a keyword research tool that you can trust. Some are good and pricey. Some are cheap and useless. Find the Goldilocks solution you can use.

  Google Keyword suggestion tool can give you keywords, related to your website (if you select the appropriate tab) and offers you a wide selection of phrases real people have typed in.
  WordTracker and Keyword Discovery offer free versions of their keyword research tools, but they’re kind of hollow unless you buck-up and pay for the services. WordTracker uses the data from the meta search engines and Keyword Discovery obtains data in another way, so the online tools data can only be used in a relative aspect.

  Google External Keyword Tool is a good runner up: free, and it offers lots of related words and phrases, otherwise unnoticed by other keyword research tools.

  Keywords by themselves are bound to be out of context. Clever Google will ignore non-sequitors. Put your good keywords inside of contextually valid phrases, sentences and paragraphs.

  You’ll need to keep entering your main keywords and phrases into online keyword suggestion tools to get every possible keyword combination. This will ensure you cover most keywords your potential customers will use.

  Google and the other search engines will react well to your site if you have the ideal sets of keywords represented. There are many more steps to being search engine ready and will build overall popularity, but keyword research and adjustments are a good way to dress your site for success.

  Are you into the whole SEO thing? What do you use to research keywords?

  Look at your website’s performance. If you want tips for how to clean up your performance
  Click Here.

The post Dress For Success appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.