Mar

5

Drupal SEO

Posted by admin under internet, seo, technology
The following is a list of steps for a Drupal site to optimize it for SEO.

1. Enable clean urls: Enabling clean urls gets rid of the ?q= in every URL. This only works on apache web servers. This can be done on the Site Administration > Site Configuration > Clean URLs page.
2. Fix .htaccess: Drupal has some canonicalization issues, where it creates two links per node, one that ends with a slash and one that doesn’t. This will gracefully redirect duplicate URLs. Add the following lines to the .htaccess file:
#get rid of trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?mywebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
3. Modify robots.txt: Modify this file to prevent the spiders from going after the non friendly URLs. Add the following to the robots.txt file:
Disallow: /node/
4. Install SEO Modules: These include pathauto, globalredirect, robotstxt, xmlssitemap, metatags, and pagetitle modules. These modules are described below.
5. Modify the Template: Use
appropriately: as a page title. Use only one
tag per page. Put site name in div tag, not a header tag. This formats the HTML in a way that facilitates how a spider might index the site.
6. Send RSS Feed Through Feedburner: Then have Feedburner ping Google blog search. This should help get more references to the site.

The following is a list of modules for Drupal that help with SEO.

* Global Redirect: Drupal creates duplicate URLs for content (www.mysite.com/node and www.mysite.com/node/). Duplicate URLs naturally dilute the rankings/indexing of pages. Also, search engines are hostile to this technique. This module creates a 301 redirect to eliminate duplicate URLs. This module is optional if changes the the .htaccess file are made manually.
* Metatags (aka Node Words): Creates meta tags for descriptions and keywords for the node.
* Page Title: By default, Drupal makes the page title identical to the node title. This module allows customization of the page title for the node.
* Path Auto: This modules creates a human friendly, semantic URL for the node.
* Robotstxt: This module manages the contents of the robot.txt file to filter out the content properly (remove the node/1 urls). This module is optional if changes the the robots.txt file are made manually.
* XML Site Map: This module generates and maintains a sitemap of the site for the search engines to use. The usefulness of XML site maps is in question. Some people argue that this is not helpful for SEO. All it does is help the search engines index pages, it does nothing to help page ranking. However, before a page can even begin to be page ranked it must be indexed. If this module facilitates page indexing then it is useful for getting the ball rolling on page ranking.

References for this article.

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