SEO in Drupal: On Page Optimization

This is a basic tutorial that will cover Search engine optimization in Drupal, mainly on page optimization. This tutorial will help your site to prevent some Common Drupal  SEO Errors and help search engine in indexing your site.

Summary:

• Enable CleanUrls

• 
  

  Install and Enable Token Module and Global Redirect.

• Install and Enable Path Auto Module

• Install and Enable Meta Tags

• Install and Enable Page Title

• Install and Enable XML SITEMAP module

• 301 Redirect to www or either remove www subdomain.

• Create Custom Front Page.

Modules mentioned/Useful:

• SEO Checklist
• Meta Tags a.k.a. Nodewords
• Token
• Page title
• Global Redirect
• Pathauto
• XML Sitemap module
• Google Analytics
• Open Calais

Enable Clean  URLs

Google and other search engines prefer clean URL’s. Clean urls can be automatically enable in D6 if the server allows it. If there is any issue enabling clean urls refer to http://drupal.org/node/15365

Install Pathauto Module

Path Auto module makes nice customized URLs based on tokens, and you can name path based on title, content type, date, taxonomy and username.

We can also used pathauto to name url  for every page, but that will become tedious if the site is large.

NOTE: It’s a bad idea to change the url of an existing site, because search engine will not be able to find the new specified path, in that case you can use a 301 redirect from your old path to new path.

Go to 'admin/build/path/pathauto'  -> General Settings ,For update action choose “Do Nothing. Leave the old alias intact.” Otherwise the url of nodes will change everytime you change the title of your post. Causing problems with search engines.

Global Redirect Module

Global Redirect Module is useful in redirecting the node path automatically to its alias. For example if you have a node at domain.com/node/133, Global redirect will redirect this url to your alias in path auto domain.com/my-page-title.

Similarly if node/123 is your front page. Global redirect will redirect domain.com/node/123 to domain.com.

http://domain.com/blog/title

http://domain.com/blog/title/

These two address should be same on a normal drupal site, to prevent Page not Found errors because of these two path. You have to get rid of trailing slash. You can edit your .htaccess file and add the following code.

#get rid of trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Global Redirect Module will remove trailing slashes for you as well

Meta Tags a.k.a. Nodewords Module

Meta tags is very important for search engines, there is a misbelieve in people that they are of no use in search engine optimization.

Meta Description is very important, it should be different on different pages. It should be no more than 25 words.  It should be short and should summarize the page, with main keyword in it. It’s a good idea to insert your keywords in that. It’s the text that will make human visitors click on your site link in search engine.

You can set some default keywords of your site that you can be used on every page. Add some more based on post so that it makes a unique combination, of relevant keywords.

You can use the teaser of the page if the meta description is not set. That way each page will get unique meta description if the user don’t have access to edit those tags.

Page Title Module

This is highly Recommended, The Page Title Module allows you to easily set page titles for every node.

XML Sitemap Module

Although Google claims that they will index your site without the need of submitting a sitemap. I find that the whole site never gets indexed in Google. This module allows you to upload latest sitemaps to all major search engine. And it will update the xml sitemap at every cron run.

Drupal Rewrite Rules

Make sure you do a permanent 301 redirect on your url, either with “ www” or without www subdomain.

Go to the .htaccess file

To remove the www from your site, look for the following code in your .htaccess file and uncomment and adapt:

# To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,

# (http://www.example.com will be redirected to http://example.com)

# uncomment and adapt the following:

# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]

# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

To redirect to the www subdomain of the site, look for the following code and uncomment and adapt:

# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,

# (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)

# adapt and uncomment the following:

# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]

# Rewrite Rule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1[L,R=301]


Note: Make sure to Replace example.com with your domain.

Fix Your HTML headers

In SEO there should be not more than one <h1> tag in a page and it should have your main keyword in it.

And in teaser view make sure the title of the node in the teaser view is in <h2> or <h3> tag and heading of the page( page name, taxonomy term name) is in h1 tag. Node view page title should be In h1 tag.

Custom Page for Front Page

The /node page is the custom page of the drupal by default. When search engine will spider your site it will get that page. To fix this use your custom front page to prevent duplicates.

Install Open Calais

This is a great service, read more about open calais at http://opencalais.com