Drupal SEO Basics and "How to"s

Even though Drupal is not 100% perfect , by taking the advantage of its flexibility  we can reach almost to it. I belive that  by default drupal sites are good  and search engine optimised. How ever the users who develop their site without taking the advantage of the drupal sites will experice a poor performanance. Optimizing your site for the search engines is a huge topic.Let me narrate briefly about this.

Search engine crawlers

I think a small knowlegde about the search engine should be put here. Let me say there is a wonderfull technique in every search engins known as crawlers or spiders which surf the web and save anything it sees. At each site that it visits, it fetchs all the info in HTML code from every single page it can find and saves that on its own servers. server proscesses thsese data. And these sites will be indexed in the serzh engine index. In a frequent interval the searchc engine will crawl in to our site.

Ok. Now look some inportant steps in the SEO of a drupal site.Lets start with the structure level.

Use the taxonomy well and Build up your site in good stucture

Here what I mean by good structure is divide ur site contents to categories subcategories etc. The advantage of ths is that a both the user from the real world and the search engine crawler will find it is very easy to surf. Drupal come with the taxonomy module .It is very strong and we can make a deep and wide categories.

Choose a good Theme for drupal site.

Let our site load very fast. Use good ,easy loading themes like garland.let your theme is without html errors. w3 validation is a good method for making sure that our theme having no HTML errors. Some themes by deault provide some SEO .

Now there are many modules to improve the SEO of the drupal site.

Enable cleanURLs

Considering about the url strucure of drupal site there is a small problem for these crawling and indexing . Since the dupal site url contains “ ? ” www.mydrupalsite.com?q=node/58. There is the chance of crawler neglecting anything after the “?” sign. This may cause indexing only one page. with link www.mydrupalsite.com?q=node.
 

We can customize the urls in the drupal site so that we can make it as anyithing like we wish. So enable the clean urls in your site .

Enable Pathauto

It automatically creates search engine friendly URLs based on the title of your content.

Path redirect

It helps create proper redirects. it automatically creates search engine friendly URLs based on the title of your content.

Global Redirect

Depending upon your seerver and site settings there may be some problems URL problems when clean URLs and Pathauto are turned on. tthis modules helps to fixing it.

Site maps like urlsitrmap,XML Site map ,URL list

these will create a dynamic site maps so that easrch engine can easily

Nodewords module

This will give you the feature to put keywods for your content.

Google analytics

This is a nice module that will help you to analyze your site contents ,traffic, etc. Actually it will be better if you do a serious research in the google analytics . I am sure that it will help you to do a lot to improve your site traffic.

 

 

Content optimization

This is the most important among all the above. Write in simple good grammer with out spelling mistakes, the case that you should aware here is you wirte for the users. Donnot write for the search engines, do it for the users.

Please do not put the file_names like 100ert_1. Instead of this make it some thing_very_clear.png. Same for all kind if files like videos,

Put your headings in a very clear manner . I knew some people hide the condent in special cases the search engines will not mind hidden condent and unclickable links.

Some other useful techniques in SEO

1. Social Bookmarking – submit your site to Yahoo My Web  ,Digg.com, Listible, Furl, Flickr etc

2. Post in Forums with links back to your site.

3. Write blogs in your site and share it in various sites like facebook, twitter etc. Write about all the event so things that 

Some dont’ s in the  SEO.

1. When you use meta tags ,don’t put wrong meta tags which will do the offensive effect.

2. Don’t put non real or fake links.

3. Don’t use keywords that is not related with the site or page content . Find good keywords for your site and use it.

4. Don’t put duplicate contents in your site.

5. Do not try to fool search engines. It will work some time.You cannot continue with it for a long time and seach engine will put you in low rankings.

Some famous tools to SEO

1. Google Analytics

2. Google Webmaster

3. Yahoo analytics

Special thanks to Benjamin Finklea for his book  Drupal 6 search engine optimization.