With just 30 critical bugs to go Drupal 7 is nearing completion and is shaping up to be the most elegant (powerful yet simple) version yet.  While not officially released just yet and possibly a few months to go until we see a solid release candidate, Drupal 7 is already looking very good.

Hello Best Rankers! Today I’d like to point out a single, interesting fact about our organization.

You may not realize it but Best Rank does more than just SEO.

But why should that be important to you?

Hello fellow Best Rankers, today I have just a quick post.  

Matt Walker, our CEO, was recently interviewed by the Small Business Advisory (SBA) internet talk radio and provided a segment discussing some basic tips and tactics to increase website visibility from a business owner's perspective.

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6/24/10 SBA Interview with Matt Walker

And here is the direct link to the mp3 sound file.

In addition during the interview Matt also goes into

• What clients can expect from a typical SEO campaign
• How long it takes to see results
• And what not to do as a business owner when undertaking an SEO effort.

We also have some older SBA interviews.

Happy Tuesday and happy listening!

This week I thought I'd share a little drupal web development nugget I'm sure many other developers will find useful.

The problem: we were recently tasked with creating dynamic, multi level drop down select form elements.  What I mean is, the user is to be presented with a single drop down select with several options to choose from, they choose one, then another drop down select appears below or to the side of that one, they make a selection... and the process repeats N number of times as needed. 

Here is a working sample form

Normally you might like to use a bit of ajax to listen to the first drop down select box, then based on the selection, call in the URL that spits back the new drop down select and write it into the web page, ugh - and you do all kinds of bug testing and hair pulling when you can't figure out WHY it's not working, yea do don't want to do that.

The solution: Enter a technology called "AHAH".  I had sort of heard about this one in the past but figured it was worth explaining a little more now that I've worked on it.  AHAH (yes it sounds like "ah-ha!") stands for Asynchronous HTML and HTTP and is really just a subset of AJAX.  In laymens terms, AHAH can be used to dynamically update web pages, say to insert an image into a specific div tag upon clicking a specific link or refreshing an entire web page with new content without actually hitting the refresh button or - oh yea - inserting a second drop down select based on what was selected in the first drop down select - genius!

So Drupal actually makes it really really easy to create these types of AHAH driven drop down select forms.  AHAH is already built into drupal 6's core but you need to download and install this AHAH helper module because without it making these kinds of forms is still a hassle.

The magic can be seen with this sample module linked directly from the module page

http://drupalcode.org/viewvc/drupal/contributions/modules/ahah_helper/ahah_helper_demo.module?view=markup

You will note that the AHAH helper module does most of the work for you by abstracting away all the javascript/AJAX code and leaves the developer to work with just the Drupal form API (adds a few new elements to the form API) - now that's sweet.  Just

• Call the "ahah_helper_register" function at the start of your form and
• Make sure to set #default_value of each dynamically inserted drop down select to that last known value
• and that's it!

By the way you can still use AHAH with Drupal's form API to create other fantastic UI results, other than dynamic, multi-dropdown selects.  Try taking a look at this tutorial on how to create your own custom callbacks to bring more flexibility to your forms.

See you all next time.

Hi there Best Rankers, thought I'd share a few CSS tips and tricks today.  I know, I know, CSS is one of those things hated by many developers who work server side... but is a modern web technology and does help to know a little bit about the subject, especially if you're developing websites like we are!  I've actually grown to really like CSS and found it quite powerful when it comes to creating the front-facing, user end portion of websites.

Here are some nice tidbits of CSS that might help with your everyday coding:

Last year I talked a little about the semantic web and how I think search might change as a result.  I've been getting the feeling that as the web evolves, search is moving towards being more semantic in nature, allowing people to find what they're looking for more intuitively with less effort.

Even though we've had it up on our site for a few weeks, I'd like to announce the Organic SEO Click Distribution Calculator tool, which can tell you how many estimated organic clicks and dollars you would receive from a single keyword ranking position in Google.

Kind of a neat tool because if you were ranking say at position six for a particular keyword but wanted to know about how many more organic clicks you could get if you were to rank at number one, well now you can!

Has it been almost six months since my last drupal module post?  Well then, time for another drupal module round up!

Last week after attending the monthly San Diego Drupal Group meeting there was an interesting module discussion between all the drupal enthusiasts, and so here are some of the latest and greatest modules discussed and used by Best Rank:

Today I noticed seomoz launched a new link analysis tool that really has the seo community buzzing and for good reason:

HO HO HO Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone!

I'm feeling rather jolly this holiday season and am going to share a bit of interesting data.  Want to drive a bit more traffic to your website?  Good, listen up.

Below is an analytics data set showing daily, organic traffic, collected over the past 18 months (June 08 - Dec 09) for just one of the website's we've worked on.