Ask Freelock

You launched your Drupal site yesterday, and it's not on the front page of Google. What do you do now? One of our clients asked us about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recently, so I thought I'd share some advice from our experience.

First of all, getting organic search results takes time. It doesn't happen overnight, and you're lucky if you're findable on popular terms within the first couple months. Why? Because...

Mel asks:

Why would I use Drupal instead of Microsoft Expression Web to create a website?

I actually had to look to find out what Expression Web is--I hadn't heard of it before. It looks like a successor to FrontPage, something similar to DreamWeaver for creating static web sites.

So to rephrase, why should I build a site on a content management system, instead of using a tool that lets me build a site directly?

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:

• Proprietary platform
• Custom code
• Open Source
  

George asks, why is everybody talking about Twitter?

Let me be the first to say, I hate reading and hearing about Twitter. The news media is filled with reporters talking about Twitter. Twitter itself has all sorts of "Social Media Gurus" that will tell you how to gain followers and use it to your best advantage.

It's all hogwash, and most of these stories are an utter waste of time.

Ksenia asks, how difficult is it to move all our stuff from Media Temple to SliceHost? I want to be able to make changes on site any time myself.

That's not a simple question to answer, mainly because Media Temple and Slicehost offer completely different kinds of hosting. To help clarify hosting, let me break it down into a few different types:

We get a lot of questions about how to fight spam. For the most part, it's too late when it reaches your email program--but on the mail server, there are several tactics we employ to minimize what reaches your inbox.

Some of these can be applied universally, while others offer very effective protection with some trade-offs:

No, it's not a misspelling. Symfony is a framework for rapid development of PHP web applications.

Jim asks:

First, a disclaimer. I use a $20 Samsung as my day-to-day phone. It does text messaging. It has a lame WAP web browser. It makes phone calls. It has a few games. That’s about it. I’m a bit of a Luddite around smart phones, for a variety of reasons.

Patrick asks,

Why not OpenSuSE, instead of Ubuntu?

At Freelock, we provide a maintenance service contract to manage Linux servers. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide monitoring, system updates, application updates, and our help recovering anything that goes wrong with an upgrade. We’re looking at adding disaster recovery to the mix, raising the price to cover the cost of backing up all of the data and providing varying service level agreements on how soon we will recover your machine from a total loss. But for our base price, we only support Ubuntu and CentOS, with a preference for Ubuntu. So Patrick asks, why not OpenSuSE? Read my reply after the jump.