SEO checklist for Drupal websites

March 30th, 2007 tela

Here is a checklist of important things to do to have a search engine optimized website. The tools used are specific for Drupal but this list can be adapted to any website:

  • Use meaningful words for the URL, for example the title of the page (remove all caps and put a dash (-) between words. To do this you need to enable clean URLs. There is the module Pathauto which can generates automatically the URL but use this one with caution. Especially I don’t recommend to check the option: Create index aliases. Because you don’t have direct control of how this page will display.
  • Make sure to use “title” in <a> and <img> tags.
    How to insert title in l() function:
    l($text, $path, , array('title' => 'text for title'))
    and if you need to also add a class:
    l($text, $path, , array('title' => 'text for title', 'class' => 'classname'))
  • Insert metatags in <head>. Install Nodewords module (also called Meta tags). Configure under Content management > Meta tags.
  • Activate Ping module.
  • A noticeable improvement to the core Ping module of Drupal: the Multiping module.
  • Insert pingback link in <head>:
    <link rel=”pingback” href=”PINGBACK-URL” />
  • Modify <title> in <head> as seen here. In template.php, add this line:
    $vars['head_title'] = variable_get('site_name', 'drupal') .' | '. (drupal_get_title() ? strip_tags(drupal_get_title()) : variable_get('site_mission', ''));
  • Trick Drupal into using absolutes URLs by repacing default value of base_path [’/'] with the full URL.
  • Build a RSS feed and insert a link to this feed in the <head>
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="RSS-URL" />
    To add a RSS feed in a view: go to Views, add Argument: Node: Feed Selector, Default: Display all values. this means that if you add /feed to the end of the URL, you get the RSS feed. The description in Basic Information is used as a description for the feed.
    To do this you need to activate the Views RSS module.
  • Submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
    Use XML Sitemap module to create the sitemap.

These are the main tools we are using to make a Drupal website search engine optimisation friendly. But we can find more ideas that can be used on some specific websites:

Also for more information here is the top 10 SEO ranking factors according to a panel of thirty-six search industry experts.

Entry Filed under: Drupal, Website marketing

3 Comments Add your own

  • 1. therning.org/niklas&hellip  |  April 23rd, 2007 at 10:27 pm

    Useful link: SEO checklist for Drupal websites…

    tela has posted a SEO checklist for Drupal websites. If I’ve managed to configure drupal correctly this post should get a nice URL alias automatically from the title. I’m using drupal’s pathauto module.
    …

  • 2. Michael Cordova  |  October 10th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    Hi,
    I am very interested in using Drupal to build SEO Friendly websites. My custom database software and seo/sem, Internet marketing services tie in with using a CMS system like Drupal.

    Do you provide services to install and train a company on SEO friendly Drupal sites?

    Thanks,
    Michael Cordova, President
    21st Century Technologies, Inc.

  • 3. Hagrin  |  February 1st, 2008 at 6:02 am

    Excellent SEO guide and there were actually items in this guide that I have not seen elsewhere including the Multiping module which I wasn’t aware of so thank you.

    This article is a little old though and you should update it with the Global Redirect module which solves some of the duplicate content issues you described.

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