Drupal SEO checklist and Modules

Submitted by pagetron on Thu, 05/17/2012 - 10:56

Drupal core is optimized for ranking higher in search engines because it has already incorporated the clean URL in its core and its clean coding framework. But there are a few things that can enhance Drupal’s SERP such as avoiding the duplicate title tag problems, pagination, and short meta description. Fortunately, Drupal developers have contributed a range of smart modules that are efficient enough to optimize a Drupal site for ranking higher in all the major search engines. The lists of Drupal SEO modules that are must for Drupal optimization are:

  • Page Title
  • Content optimizer
  • SEO check list
  • SEO compliance Checker

Page title module:

The best feature offered by this module is to reduce the problem of duplicate content due to pagination (which is the list of multiples pages shown at the end on the front of content page of a site). To avoid duplicate title tags you need to set the value of page suffix in the module as follows:.

[current page: page-number]

You can learn more about page title modules at: http://drupal.org/project/page_title

Remember to make your front page title a unique title than the post titles of your blog.  Normally, Drupal site let you set the slogan message for your site in the site information section, which is in the “system” of the “configuration” section. You can set your front page title as follows in the page title modules:

[site:slogan] | [site:name]

The site: slogan command will put the slogan information at first and then it will add a pipe (|) symbol and at the end it will add the site name, which will make the front page title of your blog.  For example, your site slogan is “ how to build a see friendly Drupal site” and your site name or domain name is drupalseotips , then the above command will make your site title look like:

Peaceful  world with green energy | drupalseotip

Drupal page title module settings.jpg

Content optimization

This module is to help your content get higher ranking by ensuring the on-site optimization. It checks the keyword prominence in a content’s title, body and the length of meta keywords and meta description.

Drupal SEO checklist

In fact, SEO checklist is not any module, rather it will help you to check the list of SEO modules installed in your site. If you do not have any SEO modules in your site, then this SEO checklist will suggest you which modules to install for search engine optimization. The good thing about this module is that it gives a link to the necessary SEO modules that you need to install in your site. After installing this module, you have to open the checklist and then follow the suggested links to download the SEO modules. Before installing any suggested module you need to be sure about the functionality of that module. More or less, this SEO checklist is a great tool to conduct a SEO audit for any Drupal site and this module itself can work as a benchmark to make your site SEO friendly.

The most important thing about SEO is the way you plan to index your site with search engines. For example, a site, normally, generates pages for contents, tags or categories, users, comments. And you do not need to let search crawlers to index your site because of the duplicate title tags problems. Normally, you can disallow search engines from indexing your archives, and tags section and allow the categories section. Of course you must allow the content-which is the flesh of yours site. If your site’s tags and archive pages are already indexed and you want to remove them from the indexed files list of Google, you need to put

 

To check how your site is being indexed, you can run the following command in Google’s search box:

Site: www.yoursite.com

And check that if there are multiple links for certain content. If so, then you need to take immediate action to avoid more duplicate titles being indexed by Google. To block a duplicate title you can add a robots.txt file in your site and then block some problematic URLs for a few weeks to let Google deindexed the URLs.  To check out how to disallow search crawler you can have a look at my robots.txt file creation post.

 

SEO compliance checker

When you create a page in Drupal, this module checks the SEO conformity of that node or page and gives you feedback to improve the on-page SEO for that particular page. If you have the basis idea of the SEO of a content, then you may not need this module since your intuition will give you’re the SEO feedback while you create your pages.

Finally, SEO rules are dynamic. What are valuable SEO parameters today may lose its importance in any time in the future. Keep visiting Drupal forums and post your SEO queries there, if you have any. Thank you so much for taking your time.

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