Drupal site SEO makeover

Drupal's currently my content management system of choice. But like virtually any CMS, Drupal needs some SEO tuning to make it more attractive to search engines.

I've set up a number of websites using Drupal, and this post will
gather together some of my standard actions for optimizing. I'll try to
be as exhaustive as possible on this post, starting with the basics and
moving toward more complex optimization techniques.

This post, for the most part, looks at Drupal
modules that can automate the SEO process for you. None of this negates
the need to have an accessible theme design and to do the usual SEO
activities such as building backlinks to your site. Let's get started...

1) Enable clean URLs

First stop in any new Drupal site is to enable clean URLs. This
gets rid of the querystring-based yoursite.com?q=/node/121 URLs and
replaces them with something like yoursite.com/node/121 - Not only is it
much nicer to look at, but it paves the way for the next step:

2) Install and Configure the Pathauto module

Pathauto
automatically creates text-based URLs for your site, so instead of this
being gerardmcgarry.com/node/121, it'll actually be
gerardmcgarry.com/blog/giving-drupal-site-seo-makeover. The logic behind
this is that it will be more easily readable to the human eye, and
it'll also carry all the salient keywords from your page title, which
makes it more attractive to search engines.

In-depth config: In its default state, Pathauto
creates paths as content/title-of-your-post. However, with a bit of
extra configuration, you can configure paths according to content type,
so you have photo/statue-of-liberty and blog/state-of-the-economy. Go to
Site Building -> URL Aliases -> Automated Alias Settings to fine tune how your URL Aliases are generated.

3) Install and Configure the Global Redirect module

While we're working with path aliases, it's a smart idea to install the Global Redirect module.
Where Drupal is a little lackadaisical about URLs and duplicate
content, Global Redirect works as an enforcer to ensure that all
variants of an URL redirect to a single, authoritative URL. Without it,
you'll be able to access the same content at node/121 and blog/state-of-the-economy, which looks bad to search engines. It's a simple function, but it can make a huge difference.

4) Install Nodewords module

They say meta data is dead, but even Google will use your Meta
Description tag as a snippet in its search results. Installing the Nodewords module
will automatically generate those meta tags directly from your content,
saving you from having to create them manually with each page. You can
also configure Nodewords to create a keywords meta tag from the taxonomy
tags used in the post. It's quite a powerful module than can be
extended beyond what I've covered here, so take some time to delve into
its possibilities.

Also try: Integrated metatags module - which has a very similar set of capabilities, but is slightly less intuitive to set up.

5) XML Sitemaps

Providing an XML Sitemap for your site is essential for content discovery. The XML Sitemap
module will automatically generate a sitemap for you and ping the major
search engines to notify them of new content. Install the module,
configure it. No site, Drupal or otherwise should be without a sitemap
these days.

Go further: Configure sitemap autodiscovery for your site by adding "SITEMAP: http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml" to the end of your robots.txt file.

Even further: I sometimes configure the tracker in
Drupal, and add the /tracker link as a "Latest posts" menu item. This
creates a well-linked directory of virtually every node on your site,
which means no files end up orphaned or overlooked, especially on more
complex sites where not everything (Image nodes, Organic Groups, Wiki
pages) are published on the front page.

6) Site verification

This works hand-in-hand with the XML Sitemaps module - if you're a
member of Google, Yahoo! or Bing's various webmaster sites, you need to
validate your site before they'll give you stats and information about
your site. The site verification module can handle both file and meta tag based methods of verifying your site with each search engine.

7) Google Analytics

Continuing our theme of interfacing with the search engines, you need
to install some kind of visitor tracking to track where your visitors
are coming from, what pages they're viewing and the various other types
of metrics that are important for monitoring your site's growth.

I suggest Google Analytics because it's easily become the industry standard. The Google Analytics module
for Drupal inserts the tracking code without you needing to edit your
theme, and gives you some nice configurable extras. Of course, you need a
Google Analytics account in the first place, but those are free and
easy to set up.

8) Nofollow for user-generated content

Any community site that allows the public to sign up and create
content will undoubtedly be targetted by spammers to drop links. If your
moderation skills are poor, and you allow unfiltered links to bad
websites, Google in particular takes a dim view of your site and will
demote you in search listings. You'll lose traffic. You can sculpt this by using nofollow on user-generated links. You can set this up in Site Configuration -> Input Formats - enable the HTML Filter for your default input type and then enable the Spam Link Deterrent in there. This applies nofollow to all user-generated posts, including your own.

More sophisticated method! Instead of using the Spam Link Deterrent, install and configure the Nofollow List module.
This allows you to block certain sites so that they have nofollow
automatically applied. My preferred approach is to apply nofollow to all
domains, and keep a whitelist of sites that are exampt from this. Instructions on configuring Nofollow List.

Either method will give you the added peace of mind of knowing that even if spammers are dropping links on your site, they're not getting any search engine benefit from their nefarious activities.

9) Speed it up for better crawling

Yes, there's a current school of thought that suggests Google now favours sites that load quickly.
Even if Google's plans to factor in page load times aren't there yet,
faster page loads are good for your users anyway. So, install the Boost
module for static page caching, and enable features in Drupal like CSS
aggregation to ensure your site serves pages as fast as possible.

What others say:

The are different schools of thought as to what works for a Drupal
site and what doesn't. Some people suggest using the Page Title module,
others recommend the Search 404 module as part of an SEO strategy. There
are recommendations for tools like Alinks or Glossify to create
automatic backlinks within your site.

.htaccess tweaks

One technique which I think you should try is making sure your site is only available at either yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com.
It kind of ties into the techniques for canonical URLs we talked about
in the Global Redirect section. If your site is available with and without the "www" prefix, you have potential duplicate content issues and you could be diluting the value of your inbound links. Some people may link to the www version and some to the version without it.

First, check if your site is available at both addresses. If it is,
find the .htaccess file at the root of your Drupal site and edit it.
Scroll to the section that contains the rewrite rules and you'll find
sample code to redirect to the URL of your choosing. Read the
instructions and uncomment the code of your choice, replacing the domain
details with the domain of your site.

One word of warning - if you make changes to your .htaccess and/or
robots.txt files, you have to be careful not to overwrite them when you
upgrade your Drupal installation. When I download a Drupal upgrade, I
tend to remove these files from the package so that they don't overwrite
the custom versions I've created.