Search Engine Optimization With Drupal

Drupal, as my posts can probably show, has kind of been the focus of my latest projects. While I have built and still have, a couple of my own CMS systems, Drupal has proven very useful for me in a few situations, and I have been growing quite adept to working within it and getting the most from it.

The weakness with many CMS systems, natively, is lack of search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. Fortunately for Drupal users, there are many addon modules to help add functionality and features to the core system.

Regarding SEO basics, Nodewords is the modules every Drupal user should have in the arsenal, as is Page Title and xmlSitemap.

I'll mention Page Title first, as it's the simplest. Certainly, every piece of content has a "title" in it. What this module does is allow the user to customize what appears in the title section of the header, which in the case of some search engines, can carry a lot of weight. In addition to that, the latest version also includes applying tokens, narrowing the page title to only certain node types and appending titles of paginated content.

xmlSitemap is another relatively simple module that really just builds a sitemap complying to the xml sitemap standards accepted by Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and the new tools for Bing. it rebuilds itself with each crontab execution.

Nodewords is a much more powerful module. This module allows the addition of meta tags not native to Drupal, and in most cases make them page specific. Description tags and keyword tags most notably, to deal with page-level SEO. Of course in addition there are options for copyright tags, robots tags and all sorts of other stuff. These tags can be globally defined in the Nodewords configuration tools, and also set at individual page level within each content form.

Probably my favorite feature for the Nodewords module is the fact it also allows the user to apply verification meta tags for webmaster tools for Google, Yahoo and Bing, which is huge for SEO since some Drupal users don't want to (or can't) upload HTML verification files, and without this module, can not apply verification tags. This makes those tools virtually worthless.

With these simple tools, which have a few other module dependencies, admittedly, you can actually have a pretty powerful SEO system for your otherwise, pretty incapable system.