Any new website that wants to gain a substantial amount of viewers is going to have to undertake an exceptional effort in optimization of their website to rise to the top of the search engine listings. Chances are that every other website on the same topic as yours has already implemented their own modifications, and it will come down to who has the best and most content. The practice of SEO has reached such a refinement and level of saturation that you need to have your own website up to par before you can even begin competing in content and quality because each solid modification you make to the code of your site can amplify the effect of the content.
Drupal is a wonderful CMS for its performance, extendability, ease of use, and community. It also does a pretty decent job at being optimized for search engines even out of the box. However, there are a few simple modifications you can make to increase your effectiveness in your SEO efforts. Not only will all of these help you reach the first page of search listings, some will also make your site look much more human readable as well!
The added bonus of human readability is that it makes people want to return to your site, link to it, and suggest it to their friends. It's easy to forget the human element of SEO and simply think, “What do Google, Yahoo, and Bing want to see?” If you don't have any useful content on your page, people won't link to you, and that will hurt you immensely. Even if you have the best content on the web, if it's in a completely ugly format that hurts the eyes or is difficult to navigate, it's far easier to copy that content and paste it into a file locally or find another place with better design. That's just something to keep in mind, though. Right now, we're going to assume you have (or will have) all of that in place, and we'll take the already well-optimized Drupal CMS and make a few changes to make it even better.
Set Up Drupal for Clean URLs
For humans and search engines alike, clean URLs are preferred. It's always nicer to have www.your-website.TLD/a-web-page/ instead of a string of characters that spans the screen. It's easier to link to, easier to remember, and looks much better. Search engines “like” clean URLs because they allow you to include more relevant search terms. Much like www.keyword.TLD will be in better shape for having the keyword in the URL, www.keyword.TLD/more-keywords/ will be in better shape.
To make this happen, you could manually edit all of the links on your site, but that doesn't sound like much fun. Just use the Pathauto module to set yourself up with clean, search engine friendly URLs on your site.
Speaking of Modules
Modules are a wonderful thing because somebody else has already solved your problems for you. For these, the closest you will come to encountering a laborious task is having to go into your settings, click a few boxes and buttons, set up the module, and make sure it's working correctly. Here's a list of SEO related modules that you should have enabled along with what they do:
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Path Module – The path module allows you to set the path for any post you make, specify if you want clean URLs, add aliases, and manage aliases. As stated before, this is important for both human and search engine readability as it lets you add the all important keywords to each URL on your site.
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Page Title Module – The page title module gives you complete control over the processes for generating title-bar titles (at the top of the browser window) and individual management of titles on pages. Having a separate title for the title bar and the post's title is important because it adds that many more keywords to your page.
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Global Redirect Module – This module keeps an eye over your URLs to make sure that you won't be blackballed by Google for having duplicate content when you switch to clean URLs. When an old page on your site is accessed, this module will check to see if there are any clean URL aliases and redirect the user to the clean URL. If you already have site content and are switching to clean URLs, this should be turned on before you make the switch because Google will count your first and second URL as separate pages and as duplicate content.
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Pathologic Module – Pathologic is an input filter that corrects paths for links, images, and files on your site automatically. For example, if you've moved all of your media to another server, you can set up Pathologic to automatically correct all of the content links on your site as opposed to doing so by hand.
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SEO Checklist Module – While not doing anything for your rank on its own, the SEO Checklist Module assists you in the task of choosing and organizing the tasks to complete to make your site as tight as it should be. It presents itself as a checklist of tasks for you to accomplish and scans your current setup to see what you have installed or need to install.
Am I a www Site or Non-www?
Sub-domains used to be more common than they are now. The average internet user believes (since that is the way it has always been done and shown to them) that you should add a “www.” to a domain name to access the website. A good deal of those average internet users also know that it's not entirely necessary to do so as you can simply enter the domain name to access the main page. Now, it doesn't matter what the user enters into their browser, but a webmaster should decide whether they want www. added to their domain name or not because it can affect your rank.
For example, www.joomla.org went down in rank while joomla.org was fine. Why is that? It's because search engines viewed them as separate websites because of the subdomain.
You can fix it by going into .htaccess and forming a permanent 301 redirect that sends all of one style to the other. You need to choose whether you're going to be www.example.com or example.com. If you're going to be example.com, then have all pages with the www subdomain reroute to example.com. If you want the www, then do the reverse. If your website has been established for a while, it would be in your best interest to see which has a higher rank and choose that one.
.htaccess code sample:
# 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/$1 [L,R=301]
# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
# (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Optimizing Robots.txt for Drupal
Have you ever had a bad week where a few rooms in your home were dirty, you didn't feel like cleaning yet, and guests suddenly came by? It is times like those where you wish you had a guests.txt in your home. Drupal now comes standard with a robots.txt file, but it's not quite where it should be to optimize your site. Some Drupal sites have a couple dirty rooms (duplicate content) you want to keep the search engines away from. Other Drupal sites look like a hovel owned by a stereotypical World of Warcraft addict. In either case, you should keep them from seeing the following by making these changes in robots.txt:
Under # Paths (clean URLs)
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /aggregator
Disallow: /comment/reply/
Disallow: /contact
Disallow: /logout
Disallow: /node/add
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /user/register
Disallow: /user/password
Disallow: /user/login
If your site is new and not indexed by Google yet, you should add Disallow: /*? to block access to all dynamic URLs and make sure your .htaccess 301 redirects are in order. For sites already indexed without clean URLs, you do not want to block access because you want Google to find the new links and transfer the page rank. If you like, you can block it after.
Also add:
Disallow: /node$
Disallow: /*/feed$
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /database/
Template Modifications
Finally, take a look at a time consuming yet easy modification involving your templates. In most templates, the h1-2-3 tags are out of order and need to be arranged to make your site not only look better but correctly reflect the SEO choices you make when writing content. Correct them to do the following:
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H1 should be used for the title of a post or article
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H2 should be used for subtitles of posts or articles
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H3 should be used for user comment titles or other, less important titles
Make these modifications, and it should add a great deal of effectiveness and OOMPH to the content you already have.
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