There are two main kinds of search engine optimization (SEO)--Off Page and On Page.  Off Page optimization relies on the links you get from others increasing your page rank.

On Page optimization can include:

• Ensuring that you have unique tiles and meta tags for your different pages and that they reflect the content of the page
• Using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine bots from indexing pages you don't want them to index
• Bulleted lists
• Using "static pages" for each of your pages (pathauto will do this nicely and automatically on your Drupal site)
• Creating a sitemap for the search engines to access

If you allow any kind of user generated content on your Drupal site including comments, you will invariably start to see users crop up with user names like: "gyigrrgq", "porn", and "buy viagra". At best, the users sit in the user's table and do nothing. At worst, the users probe and then blast your Drupal instance with more spam than you can shake a stick at. Often the technique will be to leave comments on old content in the hopes that site managers won't notice it but it will generate some clickthroughs to whatever site the spammer is targeting.

What I like to do is set up a block of recent comments. Sometimes it is public and sometimes it is private to a single role depending the on the site-owner's needs. This is a very simple thing to do and will allow you to see new spam comments at a single glance. If you check your site every few days, you'll catch any spammy ugliness.

The first thing I do after setting up a fresh Drupal install and creating user id 1 (which I normally name Admin) is to create a second user.

• Go to Administer
• Go to User management
• Go to Users
• Click on the "Add user" tab
• Create your new user

After that I create a brand new role called "Admin"

Over the last three or four days, I have had several people ask me about upgrading Drupal to the most recent versions of the software. At this point version 4 is up to 4.7.10 and version 5 is up to 5.5

Upgrading a Drupal site is pretty easy. It is always a good idea to grab a backup of your database and your Drupal files before starting the process. Upgrading from 4.x to 5.x is a little tougher than 5.x to a higher version of 5.x. This tutorial will focus on upgrading from a lower version of 5 to a higher version of 5. The most current version of Drupal is 5.5.

Drupal is pretty flexible in its look and feel. A Drupal site can look like almost anything. The way the look and feel of a site is defined is through theming. Drupal comes with a few themes out of the box. To change a theme, you do it through the admin of your site--you can look at which themes you currently have installed at /admin/build/themes.