Due to the exponential growth in blogs and website, Search Engine optimization popularly know as SEO have become one of the hottest topic online. From beginners to top web gurus are desperately looking for ways to improve their sites visibility in search. This post tries to explain some of the general SEO tip to follow when you are developing a Drupal website(whether it Drupal 6 or Drupal 7).

Enable Clean Url – Clean urls are SEO friendly

Its important to have urls that is self explanatory. Clean urls will have the title of your post in the url instead of some links like “node/73″  etc… This is pretty easy to do in Drupal.

• Drupal 6 users can find the option at 
  www.yoursite.com/?q=admin/settings/clean-urls.
  For Drupal 7 users the settings is at 
  www.yoursite.com/?q=admin/config/search/clean-urls.
• Enable Clean Url.
• Save the Configuration.

You can read more about How to Enable Drupal Clean Url here.

Use this along with path auto module to automatically generate meaning full links for your contents.

Meta attribute for Image Tags  - provide structured metadata about your website

Meta tags help search engines understand what the page is all about. It can also be often seen that the excerpt google use in the search result are the meta description of your website.

• For Drupal 7 use Drupal meta tags module .
• For Drupal 6  use Drupal Nodewords module.

Page title

Modifying the page title as per popular keywords or making it more meaning full and precise often gives a boost to your search engine visibility. Drupal by default generates title based on the page/node title. You can override this behavior wherever needed using the powerful Page Title  Drupal module. Its available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

Image Alt Tags and Search Engine Visibility

Most of the Drupal developers are pretty much lazy when it comes to adding alt tags to static and dynamic images in their site. Whether it be a logo in the friend page, inline images in a node or site front banner images always remember to add meaning full alt tags. Make sure to enable alt tag field when you add custom fields. It helps in giving visibility for your images in google images and also improved ranking in the search results.

Site Map allows search engines index better

Sitemap is  easiest way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages in their website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for the site along with additional metadata about each URL  so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers discover pages from links within the site and from other sites.  Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all the URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

In Drupal sitemap can be easily created using the powerful Drupal Xml Sitemap module.

Global Redirect – Prevent duplicate links to same page

It’s very common in Drupal to have multiple links to the same page. It’s a very dangerous thing when it comes to SEO. This can be prevented with the use of Global Redirect module for Drupal.

Caching and Code Optimization

Google have started using page loading time to rank websites. Google tends to rank slow websites poorly. If your site doesn’t make use of caching or doesn’t have optimized code. Then its time you do it.

• Try to reduce the no. of files requested by page. Aggregate and compress Js and Css files.
• Try to use image sprites instead of many images.
• Call images, js and css from a sub-domain or any cdn services.
• Use minified version of any js libraries or css framework you are using.

Drupal SEO Modules

Make use of vast no. of Drupal modules that are out there for better search engine optimization.

SEO Checker: This module checks node content on search engine optimization when it’s created or modified. When a publisher saves/previews a node, the module performs a set of checks and gives the user feedback on the compliance of the rules.

SEO Checklist: This module provides a comprehensive checklist of all recommended Drupal modules and good Drupal SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices. The module help to maximize the presence of your Drupal website in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Content Optimizer: The Content Optimizer module helps in increasing  website’s search engine rankings by improving on-page optimization factors and insuring that the content of site conforms fully toDrupal SEO best practices. It enables a very quick SEO analyzer that provides fully instant analysis of the site content as a quick and comprehensive guide to assure SEO best practices are consistently followed. The analysis displays important content statistics and recommendations for improving search engine rankings.

SEO Tools Dashboard Showing Analytics inside Drupal

Keyword Research Module: The Keyword Research module provides proper intelligence to assist you explore, analyze and select better and effective keyword phrases for the contents directly from your website.

It also enables you in quickly and easily organizing  targeted keywords and tag pages using a variety of popular methods.

Drupal SEO Tools: The Drupal SEO Tools module seamlessly and effectively integrates a sophisticated suite of search engine reporting, analysis and optimization tool right into your website. It provides a dashboard that integrates analytics reports with links to webmaster tools and vital Drupal SEO modules.

Search 404:  This module instead of showing a standard “404 Page not found”, this module performs a search on the keywords in the URL, e.g. if a user goes to http://example.com/does/not/exist, this module will do a search for “does not exist”.