Drupal SEO Tips, Plugins, & Modules: Drupal SEO for 2011

Posted March 29, 2011 by DIYSEO Team (0 comments)

This post is meant to be helpful for those with a beginner and intermediate level understanding of SEO. If you have a basic understanding of how Google and other search engines rank pages and are aware of some basic SEO best practices but aren’t yet an SEO expert, we think you’ll find this post useful. You can also find DIYSEO posts classified by level of expertise on the following pages:

This post is primarily geared toward website owners working in the Drupal content management system, but you’ll find that some of the Drupal SEO tips can apply to Joomla, WordPress, and site building practices in general.

Drupal is a content management system as well as a framework for building and maintaining websites. It can be very useful for sites that require constant updates such as blogs or news sites. To help out all of our Drupal users, we have compiled some basic and intermediate SEO tips that will help your search optimization efforts.

Fun Fact: Did you know that the White House website was built in Drupal? Other popular websites include examiner.com , AT&T Apps and Zappos. For a list of other notable sites, Artatm.com put together an impressive list showcasing Drupal.

Drupal SEO Tips for Beginners:

For those who are new to Drupal, We would recommend reading the Drupal Overview from Drupal.org to get better understanding of how the system works and some of its benefits. Drupal.org is a great free resource with many guides, downloads, and support from the strong Drupal community.

If you have some experience working with Drupal, you are probably familiar with modules. Modules are a great way to add a variety of feature to a website, for example SEO tools. If you have yet to install any modules, follow this How to install Modules Guide from rundrupal.com.

Intermediate Drupal SEO Tips:

Once you have become comfortable with the basics of Drupal, below are several modules we recommend installing in order to get the most out of Drupal for SEO purposes:

Page Title Module (download)
Page titles are important because they are the main text links searchers see in the results page. It is important to have custom page titles for each page as Google considers page titles as one of the most significant factors to determine what your site is all about. For more on page titles, take a look at the Seomoz Title Tag article or Hubspot’s tips on writing great page titles.

Global Redirect Module (download)
As you may already know, duplicate content is something you want to avoid on any website to make sure you aren’t confusing Google or diluting your “link juice”. The global redirect module helps you avoid this problem by cleaning up URLs and redirecting search engines to the intended page with the cleanest path. This is explained in more detail in this volacci.com blog post.

Integrated Meta Tag Module (download)
Meta data is essentially data about data which helps search engines find and sort through websites’ content. The meta tag module allows you to control the meta data on a page. The page description is the paragraph that is displayed underneath the page title in search results and is an important piece of meta data. You want to make sure the description is compelling and accurate to draw as many clicks as possible. Google Wembaster Central Blog offers some advice on writing search engine friendly meta descriptions.

Google Analytics Module (download)
One of the most important aspects of SEO is tracking your progress. A free and useful tool to use is Google Analytics. The Google Analytics module allows you to do a host of things including dictate which visitors you want to track and which you want to ignore. For example, you can tell Google Analytics to ignore incoming traffic to your site from anyone in your office so only external traffic is displayed. If instead you are simply dropping the Google Analytics code to the bottom of your Drupal site, you won’t have as much flexibility. In terms of what metrics to measure, the Marketing Sherpa Blog provides a list of important metrics to keep track of.

The Modules listed above are helpful in maximizing the content on your website built in Drupal. But keep in mind, that content is still king when it comes to SEO and that ultimately without information worth sharing or linking to, these modules can only take you so far.

Below are a few other great resources for getting the most out of Drupal and SEO: