I've been adding Sitemaps for my sites for the past 2 years or so. In all that time I'm at all not certain they have helped in the least. However, the major search engines seem to encourage you to have one, so I'll go along with it. It is so easy to add a XML sitemap for Drupal that there is really no downside.

It is important for good SEO to have page titles and descriptions. Page titles are generated by default with Drupal, but you need to install the Nodewords module to enable descriptions.

Download the Nodewords module from http://drupal.org/project/nodewords/. As usual, I got a big tar.gz file, which for me was nodewords-5.x-1.5.tar.gz. I uncompressed that into a "nodewords" folder on my harddrive with WinZip. I uploaded that whole folder to my Drupal server under the sites/all/modules directory. Next go into Administer >> Site Building >> Modules and enable Meta tags.

Since I've now had this site online for just two weeks I think I can say a little about Drupal and SEO. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization", which means setting up your site to help the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) figure out what pages are on your site and what those pages are about.

The one thing that didn't go smoothly in my install of Drupnewb.com on Lunarpages was the cron job. I've run cron manually a few times for DrupNewb, but now it's time to try and get this running correctly.

It seems that all you need to do is run the php program cron.php which is right in the root of Drupal. As I have previously set up cron jobs to optimize the MySQL tables for the custom CMS systems I have written, it wasn't too hard for me to get cron.php running for Drupal.

In my last post I really needed to have a few html <h3> tags to break things up. However, it seems that <h3> tags, as well as most other html tags, are turned off by default. So, I needed to go into the admin panel and allow a few more tags than are the default.

On the Administer » Site configuration » Input formats --> View page I had "HTML Filters", "Inline images", "Line break converter", and "URL filters" checked. I had "PHP evaluator" unchecked.

When learning a new language or system I always like to write a simple "Hello World" program. Therefore, to learn about Drupal Modules I have written "hello_drupnewb".

Perhaps this is a good time to stop and say a little about myself. You can see my complete resume here: www.LarryTruett.com

OK, so now that I have blog images working I'll write a bit more about the San Diego Drupal meeting. It was held on Novmeber 20, 2007 at the Cream Coffee Bar (www.newtosandiego.com/Cream-Coffee-Bar/) in University Heights. Another account of this meeting can be found at http://groups.drupal.org/node%252F7003.

In my last post I talked about adding the Image module. I added the Image module because I wanted to add a photo to a blog post. While adding Image allowed me to upload images to the DrupNewb site, it did not allow me to add them to my blog posts. I looked out on the Drupal.org forums, and found this post (http://drupal.org/node/193156) which said that I need the Image Assist module and why. Essentially, using the Image module allows me to upload images as "Nodes" on their own. Image Assist makes it possible to add images as supporting content for other Nodes. Makes sense.

The San Diego Drupal November 2007 Meeting at Cream Coffee Bar in University Heights.