Eight tips for Drupal SEO (Part 1 of 2)

Submitted by Chi on Fri, 2009-02-27 00:56

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a necessary means to market websites. Drupal, a free and extensible CMS not only catches the eyes of small business owners, but attracts large enterprises. So how to SEO Drupal? I show eight tips below:

1 Link depth less than four

This well-known rule is also suitable to Drupal-made websites. If we hide our pages in a deeper “link pool”, neither readers nor search engines like to grope for them. When designing a website, we’d better enable readers to reach any pages by clicking less than four times. By default, most Drupal-made web pages are under the “/node” directory; hence, the link depth is not an issue. However, if we enable the URL alias and configure our own URLs, we should keep the rule in mind.

2 Try to strike a happy medium in the node size and link number

We know a web page with hyper links is favored by search engine. However, don’t make super-bulgy nodes with a plethora of links. It’s inconvenient for search engine to examine a lengthy article linked to infinite web pages.

3 Clean url and Pathauto modules

In the past, search engine couldn’t interpret links with query string parameters. Even now, these messy links are still not ideal for improved search engines, especially if there are more than two query string parameters.

Clean url module can change awkward path arguments like www.mysite.com/?q=node/12 into www.mysite.com/node/12. After applying the Clean url module, we’d better install Pathauto module which automatically generates url alias for nodes, users, and taxonomies based on configurable rules. Although Drupal’s built-in Path module also allows you manually specifying a node’s alias, you don’t need to brainstorm each node’s alias if you install the Pathauto module.

4 Keywords and Meta tags (node words) module

If you check source code of html page, you may see two common types of meta tags, keywords and description listed as below:

Several years ago, the keywords attribute of meta tags was quite popular since most search engines weigh keywords high. Later, Search engine providers, such as Google and Yahoo realized web masters intended to forge keywords which were not covered in their websites. Keywords more often mislead users to some spam sites instead to be helpful. Consequently, the search engine providers would like to, if not ignore the keyword attribute, gave it lower weight than ever. However, we still encourage our customers taking advantage of keyword function, since it doesn't hurt at least.

Compared to keyword attribute, the description attribute of meta tags are more important. It not only be helpful to increase search ranking, but also appears in the search results and help search engine users quickly understand what the web page presents. Nevertheless, you cannot abuse description. That's not necessary, even harmful to your website. Most search engines recommend 200 words description.

With the Meta tags module, you are able to set the keywords and description attribute for nodes. After installing Meta tags module, visit "Administer >> Content management >> Meta tags” to check “Use the teaser of the page if the meta description is not set.” At least check keywords and description under “Tags to show on edit form” and “Tags to output in html head” field groups. Check also “Use front page meta tags”.

Then, Visit "Administer >> Content management >> Meta tags >> Front page" to set Meta tags in front page. As for other nodes, the “description” will be automatically generated with page teaser if you check “Use the teaser of the page if the meta description is not set.” as described above.

5 Page title

In web page source code, you can find title tags:
<head>
<title> Here is a title....</title>
</head>

The page title is displayed in search results. Even a minimized browser still shows the page tile on browser’s title bar. Moreover, the title is a very important search engine ranking factor. However, stuffing the page title with too many keywords will annoy users while they are reading the search results.

By default, the node’s title will be regarded as a page title. But if you would rather customize your own page title, you may install Page title module. Configure the page title by visiting “Administer > Content management > Page titles”

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You have mentioned the right

Submitted by ismetrogly (not verified) on Wed, 2013-07-17 07:35.

You have mentioned the right information with description . It should be follow to maintain state of site in the search engine.