This document outlines an agenda for a Drupal SEO course. It discusses using the SEO Checklist module to optimize a Drupal site for search engine optimization. Some best practices covered include optimizing page titles, URLs, meta tags, and submitting the site to search engines. The presentation recommends focusing optimization efforts on Google and describes various modules that can be used to track visitors and improve content.

1. Introduction to Drupal 7
Bonus session
Drupal SEO
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 1

2. Agenda
• Drupal and SEO
• SEO Checklist module
• Other good practices
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3. Drupal and SEO
• As a content management system and
framework, Drupal offers you great
possibilities for on-page SEO optimizations;
• On-page and/or off-page optimizations will
not bring you any business results if your
keywords research is not correctly
• In our Drupal course scope, we will not deal
with keywords research and targeting, only
with the Drupal capabilities for SEO
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4. SEO factors for success - general
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5. On-page factors for SEO success
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6. Title, description and URL lengths
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7. SEO Checklist
• SEO Checklist was initially developed by
Volacci and then ported by Blink Reaction
• The module does not optimize your website
by itself. It rather gives you a list of good
modules to use to optimize your system.
• You don’t need to install and configure all
listed modules, only those you consider really
useful for your project case
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8. Using the SEO Checklist module
• Administration > Configuration > Search and
metadata > SEO Checklist
• URL: admin/config/search/seochecklist
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9. Page titles
• Absolutely vital to have
• Requires the token module
• The best pattern you can use is {page title} |
{site name}
• Put target keywords in the beginning
• Avoid stop words as “in”, “the”, “at”, etc.
• Good to be less than 65 symbols of length
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10. URL paths
• Another absolutely important feature to setup
– Clean URLs – removes the ‘?q=‘ from the URLs
– Pathauto – sets good URLs based on tokens
– Global redirect – removes the back slash ‘/’ from
the end of URLs – avoids duplication
– Redirect module – provides webmasters nice and
healthy way to manage redirects
• URLs are good if kept under 65 symbols overall
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11. Search engine accounts
• Google account is enough
• Focus on optimization for google is pretty ok
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12. Tracking your visitors
• Google analytics tracking
– With a module: Google Analytics Module;
– The module will give you options
– You can also paste the GA code directly in your
html.tpl.php template file
• Other tracking and analytics options:
– Piwik;
– Open web analytics;
– Clicky;
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13. Page content
• For meta tags management, Meta tags quick
module is not good, better use Meta tags;
• Scheduler module is good if you plan to publish a
lot of content, and you want to do it time-based
portions, better crawleability;
• HTML Purifier – I wouldn’t use it honestly;
• Search 404 – search instead of 404 errors;
• Read more link – not really useful;
• SEO Compliance Checker – useful sometimes, i.e.
if your client is crazy on SEO topics;
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14. Clean code
• Website validation with the
http://validator.w3.org/ is good; if you don’t
manage to clear all notifications and warnings,
don’t worry;
• Links validations with the
http://validator.w3.org/checklink is also good,
really try to clean this one
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15. Submitting your website
• Again: focus on Google!
• Make use of the XML Sitemap module – this is
the standard way to communicate changes to
search engines with a site map;
• Authenticate at Google Webmaster Tools and
validate it in any way, no modules needed;
• Submit your xml sitemap to Google
• That’s it, no need for anything more!
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16. Social media
• This is not really so much SEO, more into the
ORM (online reputation management);
• If you have only 1-2 social media on your
website, use them separately as widgets, no
modules are needed;
• If you have many social networks on you site,
better use Add to Any service or any other
service which combine them into 1 place;
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17. Protecting your website
• Again: not so much into the SEO, rather this is
a topic of your website security;
• General principles:
– Machine generated passwords;
– Captcha-s on web forms
– Sessions
– Input formats
– Folders permissions
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18. Geographic
• Haven’t used them so far
• Could be managed with the Meta tags module
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19. Performance
• Yes, your website performance is important
for your better SEO results;
• Your website performance can be measured
through you Google Webmaster Tools;
• There is a lecture about Performance 
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20. Time for questions
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21. Contacts
Kalin Chernev
– E: kalata@shtrak.eu
– T: twitter.com/kalinchernev
– U: http://shtrak.eu/kalata
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