Most of the today websites were built in WordPress, but there is a significant number of websites which were built in Drupal . For example, the website of our SEO company is built in Drupal. Also, there are plenty of articles about SEO for WordPress but there are no many articles about SEO tips for Drupal. I decided to write something more about it, based on our own experience, while we were making our website.
SEO Checklist for Drupal
SEO Checklist for Drupal is an excellent tool which scrutinizes the arrangements, settings and also the modules installed on the Drupal website. With SEO checklist you can improve your URLs. This tool has become in handy in order to eliminate non recognized notations. It also can short URLs which can be found faster and more easy on search engines.
Furthermore, it also helps with the page titles and meta tags.
Use Custom Front Page in Drupal Website
This is one of the most common mistakes people make with Drupal. Drupal website by default has almost identical content to the page at “/node”. Google’s crawler will index “/node” if you are not using the custom front page.
Inbound Links for Your Website
Don’t forget: quality over quantity. It is important to have inbound links to your website. However, you need to filter your inbound links. If you put all of your efforts to get a link from a reputable site instead of spending a time on a link farms, Google will reward that.
Internal Links:
Create the links between the posts on your website. That way you will point the Google to right direction. Also, use more descriptive term instead of boring “click here” or something like that.
Do You have a Splash Page? Get Rid of It!
Although splash pages are still beneficial for artists such as musicians, if you are running a website for your small business, splash page will surely harm your SEO. The reason is simple – Google crawler can’t read Flash properly. When it comes to your site, Google expects that your home page is full of quality information instead of having a Flash on your home page.
Keyword Strategy
Don’t engage in so called “keyword stuffing”. It can hurt your rankings big time. Avoid wrong keywords. Place important keywords at the top of your content and in final paragraph as well. Obviously, put your keyword in a title and use <h> tags for your keywords. The main important advice: Write naturally. Write for the humans, not for the search engines.
Recommended Modules for Drupal Websites
- Pathauto Module: This module creates URLs which are search engine friendly. It can save you a lot of time if you are still doing this manually.
- Page Title Module: With this module you can you can specify the content title separate from your page title, which means double SEO keyword.
- Nodewords Module: You can automate your meta tags for each Drupal page.
- Global Redirects Module: This is a great module. Its purpose is to automatically do 301 redirects to your URLs
- Use Google Sitemaps Module instead of a Drupal Sitemap module : Drupal Sitemap module has a serious bug(s), based on my own experience working with that module. Google sitemaps module is much better, especially for debugging Googlebot.
- Content Access: If you have multiple users which adding content to your website, you will love this tool, because it makes the things lot easier for you.
- Mollom Module: after installing this module you will need to register on their website (free and paid version. Free is good enough). This module is great for spam. Many websites use captcha for spammers, but the Mollom module goes one step ahead of it: this module requires captcha only if it thinks the blog poster might be a spammer.
These are a few SEO tips for Drupal and short review for one of the best Drupal modules. What is your experience with Drupal?
Featured images:
- License: Creative Commons image source
Alex is a SEO specialist, and a content writer. These are his SEO Tips for Drupal based on his experience working in Drupal website for SEO-Atlanta.com
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I agree, splash pages should be avoided. These days, Thankfully, I am seeing less of these, however back in 1998-2002 they were very popular.