Tips for Search Engines Optimization of Drupal Websites

Nov 28, 2007 16:12 GMT  ·  By

The success and popularity of a website is influenced by its transparency in search queries performed on major search engines.

The SEO (search engine optimization) for a websites takes into account a high number of factors that determines the final interaction nature between website (basic content and links) and search engine spiders.

In case of Drupal websites, which are very popular on Internet, the search engine optimization actions could be simplified by establishing the initial settings according to a certain SEO direction and installing the necessary modules that will perform global changes corresponding to a given SEO action.

In the first place, you must limit the number of modules installed on the site, only to the necessary ones, in order to minimize the number of database queries. For a site with many users, you can also enable the Drupal cache, MySQL query cache or both of them.

SEO Checklist module will help you review all the settings needed for a minimal site search engine optimization. This module will suggest you a series of SEO tasks that you can check for completion. The most important module is Page Title module, which will allow you to change the way default page titles are created. Another module that must be activated is Clean URLs.

These two modules will assure a minimal search engine optimization of your Drupal website. For an advanced SEO, you should install Meta Tags module, which will help you control the keywords and description of every Drupal page. Related links module will provide links related to certain content and in the same time a high number of internal links, a positive aspect for search engine rankings.

In order to obtain one way links, you should allow the content syndication and the promotion through social networking websites, such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Reddit and more (Service links module). As a consequence of all these actions, your site is ready to be crawled by search engine spiders.

If you do not add content frequently, then you should enable the news aggregator module in order to always have fresh content on your Drupal web pages. The relevant meta-tags keywords and description, a lightweight theme, the original content, SEO friendly URLs, a high number of one way links and a simple navigation scheme will determine an acceptable rank for your web site in all major search engines.