Drupal and SEO a good combination?

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So the big thing for CMS are to be SEO search engine optimisation friendly at the moment and so I thought it would be worth highlighting a few of Drupal features and modules to aid in optimisation and content management. This is not the definitive list just a few ideas and bits that have been banded in my head.

This article is based around Drupal 5 which means far less work, those on 4.7 reading this may also want to check out articles about sending correct 404s and robot.txt file

Drupal 5 has done most of the programming side of SEO for us, it includes clean URL’s, robot.txt file, htaccess 404,301 redirects sent properly, so now its about the content and getting the content to the search engines the following modules should be useful for optimizing content for search engines.

Pathauto - Pathauto is a very simple module that automate path aliases turning example.com/node/1 into example.com/mypagetitle its very customisable allowing you to set paths based on date, or almost any variable. It also has a bulk update feature allowing you to update your entire site. This module is particularly useful to SEO because it adds semantic meaning to nodes based on their titles, it also is easier for a visitor to rememmber.

Nodewords - nodewords renamed meta tags, adds meta tag and meta keyword description which in many way has lost relevancy with most search engines but can still provide a useful description for the page and help reinforce content. This module can easily be abused and browsers keyword stuffing is a pointless waste time, as the keywords are checked against the page content.

XML sitemap - Sitemaps provide a list of pages on a site and the xml sitemap standard is a xml markup for creating a Sitemap for search engines. The XML sitemap is not designed for humans but rather the search bots and provides a way for them to identify content. An xml sitemap helps determine what items you want searched but also the priority which while is not a guarantee helps the search engines determine which pages are regularly updated. The sitemap in Drupal is perhaps most important when it comes to duplicate content, while Google and other engines do not penalise for duplicate content within a domain they will only display one result. By indicating only 1 node alias in your sitemap you can help Google and other engines which node to show. This is particularly useful when you have clean url enabled along with pathauto but your site had been previously crawled as it means paths such as example.com/node/12 are dropped from the results in favour of example.com/myarticle.

Taxonomy breadcrumb / Custom breadcrumb - These two modules provide breadcrumb trail at the top of the page, the first does this based on taxonomy (keyword categories), the second lets you customise the breadcrumb. Both provide an excellent way to reinforce relevancy and provide a useful navigation, taxonomy breadcrumb is perhaps only useful if you have a taxonomy set up and using it. I tend to stick to custom breadcumb, as it allows greater freedom though perhaps is a little more work.

Related links - Again this module reinforces relevancy and provides a nice way to interweave internal relevant content, depending on the size of your site you will find yourself manually entering a couple of links and letting it discover a few others. Make sure you place the links you want to appear at the top.

Service Links / Social media - The service links module is a great method of adding social media bookmarks to your site, but I prefer to just create a block and use greywolf excellent bookmark script.

Taxonomy/free tagging - Drupal has taxonomy module built in this allows you to organise content and even to allow del.icio.us style free tagging, and best of all its already marked up ready to be picked up by Technorati and other tagging search engines.

These are just a few of the modules that can enhance an allready very good CMS content management system for search engine optimisation (SEO)

p.s this was the first post written using Post2Blog a desktop based blogging software hopefully it will cope with the really basic formatting

Other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Drupal
HReview a CCK example using contemplate
5 Drupal Modules to Guarantee Drupal 5.0 Success
The Digg effect and can drupal survive it - looking at how drupal can cope with bandwidth spikes

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Technorati Tags: Cms, Drupal, Links, Promotion, Search, Seo