Newsfeeds

This week's highlights include a piece on Chinese romance games for women, a look at a multitude of new titles - from Crackdown 3 through Metro Exodus to Anthem, and the weird history that led to the Wu-Tang fighting game.

Firas Ghunaim February 17, 2019

"Content is king! SEO is so 2017." Sure, why not.

Where is that king's throne? Where do you find content?

Content is found on web and mobile pages across the internet, amongst millions of millions of pages. Search Engine Optimization is about the process of being found by your content consumers and readers.

What Search Engine Optimization is not is that it's all about keywords; a common and prevalent misconception. You still need to create content that is of relevance to someone searching for it.

and of course, follow Google's rules and learn their ranking factors.

Basic stuff really.

"SEO? Gotta follow the Google machine's rules bro"

 

A critical consideration that usually escapes the decision-making process of what to use to publish that content: Which CMS suits my needs the most? 

A CMS (Content Management System) is the beating heart of your digital platform, website or experience. It is where you develop, manage and publish your content. Most websites look like Ferraris' but drive like an Austin Allegro.

Long story short, the CMS you built your site on will play a key role in your SEO efforts.

 

4 Ways Drupal CMS Enhances Your SEO

I am not here to shamelessly promote Drupal CMS (I really am though), but if you are looking to create the best digital experience for your users without bothering about on-site SEO then look no further than Drupal.

At its core, Drupal was built with SEO in mind. It has the power, flexibility, and tools needed to optimize every facet of your website for search engines, and in its huge kit of modules, there are quite a few that are dedicated to giving you an easier time when it comes to improving the optimization of your website. 

 

1. Implementing Meta tags

 

Meta tags are bits of text that are integral when it comes to improving your website’s search ranking, because, in a way, it tells search engines what the content is on each page on your website. This could be the titles of your pages to the little descriptions you see underneath the website links on a Google results page. You and your search engine need these bits of information to properly present and index your site on the search results page.

Usually, you can leave it up to your search engine to generate your page’s metadata for you, but by using the Drupal Metatag module, you can customize the metadata yourself. Set your own information such as page titles and descriptions to more properly and correctly present your site to your search engine and the online world.

 

Read More: 6 Reliable SEO Tools To Make Your Life Easier   2. Cleaning up Your URLs

 

Having bad, messy-looking links is a no-no when it comes to SEO. You want links that are easy to read and not just a jumble of letters and numbers so that they look more attractive to prospective visitors and to your search engine, who may be looking at your URL for keywords when it determines your site’s ranking.

Many web developers never realize the implications of messy URLs and leave their link syntax as-is, but going through each and every page on your website and manually setting the URLs isn’t an attractive option either. Luckily, Drupal generates clean URLs by default, improving the readability of your links and making things a bit easier on you.

If you want your links to be better and even more easy on the eyes, popular Drupal module Pathauto is a configurable system that automatically creates clean and extremely readable links that are perfect for your site’s optimization.

Another thing to keep in mind is making sure that your links actually go somewhere. Nothing sours the user experience more than clicking a link and being presented with a 404 page, and this in turn negatively affects your search rankings.

You can avoid this from happening by using the Redirect module. If you happened to have changed the page’s URL after Google indexed it, or moved the content to a different URL, this module allows you to make 301 redirects from that old link to the new one, quickly and painlessly, without having to go through the headache of cleaning up after yourself and fixing broken links.

 

3. Improving Page Speed

 

Google has been using the speed your page loads as an influencing factor in search rankings for years at this point. As they point out, sites that load faster have users that stay on for much longer, so it’s not only Google that you’re pleased by speeding up your website.

You might have to spend a little to have your website up to speed, but Drupal comes with several measures to help pages load faster, such as using BigPipe.

However, it’s not only desktop users you have to keep in mind, but mobile users, too. Given the leaps and bounds that technology has undergone in the last couple of years, you now find more and more people browsing the web on their smartphones and tablets. It’s important to make sure that your site experience is just as friendly and accessible on mobile devices as it is on desktop computers. As anyone who has used a desktop site on a mobile device knows, it’s not a pleasant experience.

Drupal’s default theme is responsive by design, which means it will display well on mobile screens of any size without having to do complicated rewrites of code or having to juggle multiple URLs to make sure your site displays correctly. With Google now also looking at the page speed of mobile sites, it’s now more important than ever to focus on delivering a good, well-optimized mobile experience to improve your SEO.

 

Read more: SEO Checklist Before Launching Your Drupal Website

 

4. Talking to Your Search Engine

 

Optimizing your website can be a little tough when you don’t even know basic things such as where your site traffic is coming from. Installing modules like Google Analytics makes you privy to such information, and for someone with their finger on the pulse of the site’s SEO, it’s perhaps one of the most important tools they can have.

With Google Analytics, you get to know things about your site visitors: Where in the world they come from, which links they followed to get to your site, which pages they visit and how much time they spend on those pages, what keywords they searched to find your page and more. If you’re concerned about SEO, then getting information about your website directly from Google, the most popular search engine in the world is valuable information to have, and can help you make decisions on what to improve on next.

And while you’re pulling information from Google about your website, you can also provide information about your website to Google in the form of an XML sitemap. These are specially formatted, condensed summaries of the pages of content on your website that you can submit to Google to help them find your site and let their bots crawl through your pages. Google can crawl through your site without an XML sitemap, but you take on the risk of them possibly missing pages.

With Drupal, generating an XML sitemap is as easy as installing the XML sitemap module which creates one for you, and modules like Cron can automatically make sure your sitemap is kept up-to-date with the latest information from your website.

Read More: Top 5 Drupal Modules For Marketers

Drupal is inherently optimized for search engines after all the whole idea behind Drupal was to enable the creation of digital experiences that are user-centric. That user includes the development team who are always aided by the open-source community of experts that provide us with awesome SEO tools such as the SEO Checklist.

You see, friend... SEO is not dead. Content's prominence just made SEO eternal.

Want to boost your site’s traffic and rank #1 on Google with Drupal? Message us through our Contact Us page, or via email at sales@vardot.com.

Provides a framework for developing widgets for Recurring Dates Field, and a few bundled widgets.

Mirror repo: https://github.com/dpi/date_recur_modular

Bundled widgets

The project comes with 3 widgets:

Makes it possible to generate private/public keys for any entity.

For example, if you want to generate a key pair and display the public key information per project node. Or per user.

This is what powers the ssh keys part of Violinist.io

Signature pad an electronic-signing script, this Image Widget allows you to sign with HTML5 canvas based on field image.
your signature will save as a image.
This module requires the following module: file, libraries,
when you create new image field you can select widget "Signature field"

Commerce Replace Order allows end user to either replace the previous order
completely or a line item from the previous order.

This module allows to Replace customer order just by creating an simple link or
button.

i.e.
1. Link can be created as "/user/{user_id}/orders/{order_id}/replace-order"
for replacing the previous order completely where
{user_id} - the current logged in user id.
{order_id} - the order id which has to be replaced again.

This project integrates https://github.com/mattboldt/typed.js library in Drupal CMS. typed.js is a A JavaScript Typing Animation Library and original JS library development credits stay with Matt Boldt

Once enabled within the theme it will allow for the placement of a simple block with a field for a 'Name', 'Email', 'Subject', and Message'. Once these fields are filled out and submitted it will send an email to the user who installed the module or a user can enter in an email in the administration panel.

In my application of the block it is hidden until a button is clicked. It will then appear over the content of the page. That explains the size and structure of the block. Anyone is free to modify this module completely.

To Install:

Smart Content Data Layer is a helper module to be used in conjunction with Smart Content. It collects data from smart content displayed on a page and provides it to analytics platforms like Google Tag Manager via the dataLayer object.

The study looked at data surrounding British teens and notes that, unlike previous research into the potential link, the hypothesis, methods, and analysis technique were publicly registered ahead of the actual research. ...

This module provides per-domain role functionality on Domain Access sites, for Drupal 8.

It leverages the domain_config submodule, providing a different configuration for user roles for each domain, and provides a UI to manage them.

In the following essay, the leading technical artist of Nekki’s Russian development partner Banzai Games, Roman Tersky, describes the rendering process and the materials used for the characters' equipment in the mobile game Shadow Fight 3.

Bioshock Infinite A game which was supposed to be the end of the Bioshock series, but does it really do justice to its predecessors?

A blog post explaining some of the foundational voxelart styles in videogames. This applies to general voxelart as well but it serves to build a better understanding for the form in video games.

Recently, a lawmaker in Pennsylvania proposed a law to tax the sale of video games rated M or AO by ESRB at 10%. Can states legally do this?

Produced for the fourth year running, these 'Flash Forward' videos are always great encapsulations of what makes GDC talks great: they're fun, lovable, and surprisingly informative! ...

GDC 2019 is in a month and it's a time for many indie developers to network and pitch their games to investors. Rebekah Saltsman owns 51% of Finji, which makes and publishes indie games. She has a decade of experience listening to and making pitches and i

This week, we got a chance to talk to Zack from Mega Cat Studios to talk about developing retro games for new consoles, marketing physical games in the digital age, and how they’ve built their die-hard community of retro fans.

If you were ever interested in the behind the scene numbers of a small gaming blog's Patreon, then I'm going to open up my wallet and show you everything that's in it.