SEO & Drupal

Drupal's SEO Advantages

A significant advantage of using a sophisticated content management system like Drupal is that it produces HTML pages which are error free and have all their formatting information located in CSS style sheets. This makes it easy for search engines to crawl your site as they don't have to wade through loads of HTML code.

Drupal also has many optional modules that can be added to assist you optimise your site for search engines. We add these modules as standard in all the sites we develop.

SEO Techniques

Meta Data

The Meta Data module exposes the meta tags so that a site administrator without HTML knowledge can easily maintain them. While the meta keywords are of very little, if any, benefit to a site it is definitely worth while putting the effort into ensuring that the meta descriptions are completed and an accurate description of the content of each associated page.

Clean URLs

Drupal is able to convert the dynamic parameters used to locate content, e.g. for this page ?=seo/drupal into the more search engine friendly static format, seo/drupal. This format is easier for search engines to read and for people to remember.

To enable this feature, the server you run your website on must support the Apache mod_rewrite module. Full information on how to install this feature is available at clean urls.

URL Aliases

Search engines will give better rankings to pages that have more natural URLs, which don't have too much goggle goop in them, especially if they also include relevant keywords. e.g. seo/drupal rather than node/74. The Path module lets you create URL aliases for all your Drupal pages.

There is also a Drupal module which will automate the process of creating URLs for your sites pages. In general, we don't recommend this module unless your site has a very large number of pages and coding the URL Aliases manually would be a significant overhead. The aliases this module produces are based upon a "pattern" system which the administrator can control.

Sitemaps

Most search engines now accept a structured site map as a way for the site owner to tell the search engine about their sites content. This site map has to be in XML format. The Drupal XML Sitemap module will automate the generation of this file and also submit it automatically to all the main search engines every time you modify your site.

Redirection on page not found (404)

The Search 404 module will automatically redirect users and search engines to valid pages if an invalid URL is entered. This will help ensure that you do not lose traffic as a result of old or invalid URLs. Instead of showing a standard "404 Page not found", this module performs a search on the keywords in the URL, e.g. if a user goes to www.web4site.co.uk/drupal/seo instead of the correct www.web4site.co.uk/seo/drupal the module will search on "drupal" & "seo" and find the correct page.

Google Analytics

Add Google Analytics to your site to give you feed back on how well your site is performing. It won't actually boost your site but it might prompt you too.

Internal Links

Cross linking your websites content greatly assists search engines to know which pages are important. This can be achieved automatically using the Drupal alink module. It is very easy to use, you just enter your content as normal and then set the terms & links you want on your website through the administration interface. This module works dynamically, replacing the plain content with internal links as the page is displayed. You can control the number of occurrences to change and which content types are affected.