On this blog, I've talked about adding metadata to your Drupal site and tracking your Drupal site with Google analytics. The next step on the way to search engine happiness is to begin spoon-feeding Google all the latest content on your site.

The way to do that is through a sitemap that you register with Google. Right away we have to make a clear distinction between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps.

I've added some content to this site, and now I want to make sure that this content is properly structured, tagged, and described in order for it to be found easily by search engines and searchers. This is a pretty good definition of SEO hygiene - the technical tricks and content practices that make your content findable.

Analytics are the heart of SEO. As Peter Drucker, Robert Kaplan, and millions of others have said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." For SEO, to say that is almost redundant. (Technically, it would be a tautology. I apologize, but I have 2 degrees in professional writing so these things matter to me.)

What I'm trying to say is that from a certain basic perspective, there is nothing more to SEO than managing the numbers you get from Google. Visits, bounces, average times, segmentation, and so forth - that's all that matters. As you might guess, I have different ideas, but this is not the blog post to get into it. Instead, a quick shakedown on how to get rolling with Google analytics with a Drupal site.

I've created a new Twitter account, just for this site, and I have added the Twitter module to this drupal web site. It's pretty nice - now when I create a new blog entry, a new tweet goes out automatically with the title and a link back. That means links back to my site, the opportunity to reach new readers, and all kinds of good things.

Greetings!

This is the first post for TorontoSEOhelp.com, and I'm publishing it far sooner than anybody would normally. The site is newly created, I am just using a stock theme, and I haven't even loaded all the modules I need. In short, this site is not ready for prime time.

So why am I blogging? Because I want to do something a little different. When creating a new web site, or reworking an existing site for that matter, there are a thousand little decisions that get made along the way. Most of those decisions are not very interesting to anybody but the webmaster. But some decisions will have a lasting impact. And in particular, some decisions will have a profound impact on the site's search engine optimization, the brand identity I am trying to construct, and the marketing and sales systems I am trying to put in place.