On-page SEO for Drupal

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing ("SEM") which may deal with paid inclusion

Off-page factors Social marketing Blogging Forum Postings Search Engine Submission Directory Submission Social Bookmarking Link Exchange Link Baiting Cross-Linking Photo Sharing Video Promotions Business Reviews Local Listings & Yellow Pages Article Submission Press Release Promotion Classifieds Submission Social Shopping Network Answers Document Sharing Widget / Gadget Development PPC Ad Campaign

On-page factors Unique Content !!! Pretty URLs Internal Linking Meta Data Crawl ability Sharing options Tracking tools Analyses and Reports

Drupal is robust publishing system with great possibilities to structure different content types Drupal has a lot of contributed modules that will help your site catch the eye of search engines

Next List of actions that benefits both the human and robot visitors to your site and which Drupal modules you can use to help you achieve that goal.

Create unique content and update it frequently Content published and unpublished on specified dates Content managed in an arbitrarily ordered list Content workflow states: Draft, Review, and Published Humans – loyalty, returning visitors Robots – increase frequency of indexing http://drupal.org/project/scheduler http://drupal.org/project/nodequeue http://drupal.org/project/workflow

Create valid HTML Use appropriate tags - <head> <a> <h1><h2>..<h6> <strong> No javascript in the primary menu Tables are for tabular data Add “skip to content link” to show robots where the main content is Validate before launch Humans – Improve the user experience. Browser needs to translate HTML correctly. Robots – Easier to identify and extract content if they don’t get confused by invalid tags. http://validator.w3.org/

What You See is What You Get Don’t trust users content Prevent XSS exploits Use alternate and title text for images. Spam wars Moderate your Content http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg_filter http://drupal.org/project/HTMLPurifier http://drupal.org/project/imagefield http://drupal.org/project/mollom http://drupal.org/project/captcha http://drupal.org/project/moderation

Custom Page Title Define accurate Title Tags on every page. Token Integration Token Patterns per-content type Pagination Suffix Humans – Ease of bookmarking and selecting relevant sites from SERP Robots – Title is most important On-Page factor http://drupal.org/project/page_title http://drupal.org/project/token

Meta Data tags on every page. Analyze content and define keywords Meta Description Humans – Often used as description below listing in Search Engine results page. Tells people why they should visit your site. Robots – Assists with topical relevance. http://drupal.org/project/nodewords http://drupal.org/project/token

Create Intelligent URLs Define Site Structure Identify hierarchy Consistency, ease of navigation Humans – Easier for Sharing, Bookmarking, Remembering URL Robots – Keywords extracted from path may have keywords http://drupal.org/project/pathauto http://drupal.org/project/token http://drupal.org/project/menutrails http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs

Internal Linking Manage related or similar pages Wiki style links Automatic links Humans – Ease of navigation Robots – Spiders indexing pages, increase PageRank http://drupal.org/project/relatedcontent http://drupal.org/project/nodepicker http://drupal.org/project/glossify http://drupal.org/project/freelinking

No-follow links Blacklist and Whitelist Robots.txt Let spiders know what to index Humans – Consistency, ease of navigation. Robots – Identify hierarchy http://drupal.org/project/nofollowlist http://drupal.org/project/robotstxt

Prevent duplicate content http://mysite.com/node/347 http://mysite.com/node/347/ http://www.mysite.com/node/347 http://www.mysite.com/node/347/ http://www.mysite.com/index.php?q=node/347 http://www.mysite.com/index.php?q=node/347/ http://mysite.com/index.php?q=node/347 http://mysite.com/index.php?q=node/347/ http://mysite.com/path/to/content http://mysite.com/path/to/content/ http://www.mysite.com/path/to/content http://www.mysite.com/path/to/content/ http://www.mysite.com/index.php?q=path/to/content http://www.mysite.com/index.php?q=path/to/content/ http://mysite.com/index.php?q=path/to/content http://mysite.com/index.php?q=path/to/content/

Why? Different URLs representing the same content. This is dangerous territory for duplicate pages which can get you sandboxed * by the search engines! How? Checks the current URL for an alias and does a 301 redirect to it if it is not being used. Checks the current URL for a trailing slash, removes it if present and repeats check 1 with the new request. http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_Effect

WWW or No WWW, that is the SEO Question http://www.mysite.com != http://mysite.com Don't allow broken links Selectively scan node types and comments Selectively scan blocks Humans – Improve the user experience. Robots – Robots don’t find dead ends or spend time chasing files that don’t exist. http://drupal.org/project/linkchecker

Provide Site Maps (HTML/XML) HTML : A directory. Ease of navigation. XML : Ease for indexing. Can give spiders a "hint" which pages have most value and how often updated. Be careful at the beginning Track when Google spiders index new content http://drupal.org/project/sitemenu http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

Share on Social media and Social bookmarking sites Let visitors share your content Manage accounts on social networks Trackback links http://drupal.org/project/share http://drupal.org/project/sharethis http://drupal.org/project/trackback http://drupal.org/project/pingback http://drupal.org/project/twitter http://drupal.org/project/fblike

Provide a site Search Never feel lost in the data Humans – Give people an alternate way to get to content. Robots – N/A http://drupal.org/project/sphinx http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search http://drupal.org/project/search404 http://drupal.org/project/search_by_page

Syndicate via RSS Let people follow your feeds Validate XML files Humans – keeps people coming back Robots – Ping, Fresh content http://drupal.org/project/Views

Track , Optimize, Research, Analyze and Measure Track and Optimize content Research and Analyze keywords Be mindful of Keyword Density Create Reports to measure results http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics http://drupal.org/project/contentoptimizer http://drupal.org/project/contentanalysis http://drupal.org/project/scribeseo http://drupal.org/project/readability http://drupal.org/project/w3canalyzer http://drupal.org/project/kwresearch http://drupal.org/project/kwanalysis

Even More SEO Compliance Checker SEO Checklist SEO Friend http://drupal.org/project/seo_checker http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist http://drupal.org/project/seo_friend Read articles on SEOMOZ Follow best practices http://www.seomoz.org

Google Analytics Google Webmaster Tools Google Zeitgeist (trendspotting) Google AdWords keyword tool Google Search insights Google Trends for Websites Google Jazz Google Caffeine Google Mayday Update Weekly/monthly follow-up Not to fast

On-page SEO for Drupal

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