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

4 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.

  • 4. Helena G  |  November 5th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

    Make your webpage to dominate google: Free online Web Mastering and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools Check your web pages performance and position on search engines. Improve your website with Free Search Engine .Web SEO Masters offers you Free Webmaster Tools . Google PageRank Prediction Predicts your future Google PageRank. You never know when google makes the next update. Google Page Rank Checker Use this online SEO tool to find out the Google PR of a specific website. PageRank Online ……..

    http://www.webseomasters.com/

    Web stats provides the traffic of your site, a variety of statistics and analytics to help webmasters analyse their traffic. Why do webmasters have to track their visitors? Tracking the visitors is an essential part of any online business. Learn how many visitors you are getting and have the statistics tracking capability.

    But, you want to know even more about your visitors and their behavior, such as:
    How many visitors come to your site?How many visitors per day do you have? Where are your visitors coming from? From which page did they come? What keywords did they search to find your site?What pages did they view?How long did they stay?How many visitors per week, per month? Which search engines did your visitors used to find your webpage?

    http://www.webseomasters.com/free-website-statistics.html

Leave a Comment

Required

Required, hidden

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Trackback this post  |  Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed