Essential Steps for SEO Success with Drupal

It’s not just getting a site ranked. It’s also about how the search engine lists and shows your site. It’s really about getting the customers that want your product to be able to find your site. Here we'll go over some essential SEO tips you may follow if you're a Drupal Ninja looking for Web Marketing success

Clean Urls

It’s easy to get rid of the complex urls, by going to admin/settings/clean-urls
Run the clean url test, then enable clean urls

Rich Relevant Text Content

A good benefit of Drupal is the ammounce of text, and especially text links. This is a good thing, and so it’s a plus to use this feature and also to make them relevant. We can theme the links, but keep them as searchable content. We can use modules like Render or SIFR as well, or just clever CSS.

Keywords as Catagories

Using taxonomies to properly catagories the content is useful for search engines, and also for users. It’s very easy to get what has become widely known as “tagging”, by using the Free tagging option in Drupal catagories. To do this create a new category and set it up for free tagging, add content and add tags. We can see this relevant content sub-pages at Taxonomy/term/1 . This creates great Spider food..

Controlling search engine robots

Robots or Spiders do the crawling of the sites for the search engines. We can control these with the Robot.txt. file. A good way to block pages is :Add these to disallow: /logout/ and also /node/add/
The other way is simply to control what links can be seen by default, before logging in.

Intelligent page titles

Automatically renaming urls – or path aliasing is a great option for helping raise your ranking. You can use the pathauto or pathalias module. The pathauto module will do this automatically for you.
The default setting usually works well, but you can also tweak the settings as well if you want.

Preventing duplicate content - Global Redirect

It’s important not to have duplicate content, and I’d saying having Global Redirect setup is essential. It means that where there is more than one alias, there will proper redirects for the search engine spiders, hence no penalties. If you are using clean, aliases paths having a Global Redirect is essential

www and http://

Some people want both to go to the same place, so need to update the .htaccess This can be done by simply uncommenting the write lines about the RewriteCond in the .htaccess file

There are lots of other tips and tricks, for more help with SEO, try www.WebMarketingGurus.co.uk and www.PsiPi.com or you can ask us to get you in touch with them. They love Drupal Ninjas.