Small Steps to Big Results: Tweaking Drupal to Be Search-Engine Friendly

Drupal is widely acknowledged to be a powerful, extensible and easy-to-use content management system with ever-expanding capabilities. It may come as no surprise, then, that in its initial configuration, Drupal is fairly well set up for search engine optimization. However, there are several important steps you can take to ensure that you're getting the most out of Drupal and maximizing your chances of climbing to the top of the search engine rankings.

For the purposes of this article, we're generally going to assume that you're starting with a blank slate – a new Drupal installation without existing content. Where there are particularly important caveats if you have existing content, I'll make sure you don't do something that will ruin your ranking in a hurry.

Before we begin, you may want to check out the SEO Checklist module. It's a handy tool that organizes your efforts to optimize Drupal for SEO. It will scan your system and tell you which modules you still need to install, keeping track of the installation of each module as you proceed through the checklist.

Keep It Clean

Your first task is to tell Drupal to use English-readable URLs for all areas of your site. Search engines use these URLs to index sites just as you would. Is it easier to read http:///forum.yoursite.com/?q=node/3, or http://forum.yoursite.com/topic/how-can-i-optimize-drupal-for-seo. If you were to Google "optimize Drupal for SEO" you'd be much more likely to retrieve the later URL than the former. The Pathauto module for Drupal turns every URL on your site into a clean, descriptive URL.

Adding this functionality to your site is simple. First, you need to enable Clean URLs in Drupal. This does not require a contributed module, but the process can vary depending on your web server software. If you're using Apache, all you need to do is copy the .htaccess from your Drupal archive to the root of your Drupal installation, and then enable Clean URLs from the Site Configuration page.

Next, you must make sure that both the Path and Token modules are enabled in Drupal Administration. You may need to download the Token module if you don't already have it.

Finally, download, install and enable the Pathauto module as you would any other module. At this point, your Drupal system will automatically generate an English-readable alias whenever someone creates new content. If you're doing this on a site with existing content, misconfiguring the Pathauto module can cause all your URLs to suddenly change, breaking existing links and confusing search engines to no end. You can prevent this by enabling the option to create a new alias in addition to the old alias. Once you do this, you must enable the Path Redirect module and choose the option to redirect the old aliases so visitors are redirected from the old meaningless URL to the new clean and readable URL. If you have existing content, you'll also want to install and enable the Global Redirect module so that if users access your old, non-clean URLs, they are redirected to the clean version. This also keeps the search engines happy because you won't have any duplicate content on your site.

The Pathauto module has a ton of configuration options, too many to go into here, but even in its default configuration, each new page of content on your site will now have a "clean" URL. This combined with quality content will do a lot to boost your page rankings.

Use Titles to the Max

Page titles are obviously important for SEO purposes. In its default configuration, however, Drupal uses the same text for the title of the page that appears in the title bar and the heading of the actual page body. This is a waste, since using two different titles allows you to maximize your key word distribution. Luckily, there's a module for that.

It's called, simply, the Page Title module, and it does what you might expect: separates the title of each node from the page title displayed in the title bar. You can edit this title via the Page Title field in each node edit form.

You can then combine these two titles to squeeze in as many key words as you can while maintaining the quality of the content. If you're going to err on either side as far as key words, it's generally better to populate the Page Title field with more key words and use a more descriptive title in the header field at the top of each page.

Head in the Right Direction

Although this doesn't apply solely to Drupal sites, it's important both for search engine optimization and readability to use heading tags the way they were meant to be used. That means stacking headings from lowest to highest, with the title of the content surrounded by h1 tags, the subheadline by h2 tags and any other sections of the page in h3 tags. Not only does this look better and allow search engines to easily determine a page's topic, it also makes your site more accessible to users with non-standard browsers or those who use tools to enlarge text on the screen.

Of course, for SEO purposes, it's important to make sure the heading tags contain your desired key words. This isn't as important as you go down the page, but it's critical for the first couple heading tags. Although it can be tempting to customize your site and leave these tags out, you'll open your site to more people as well as optimize it for search engines by utilizing them to their best advantage.

Point in the Right Direction

As you set up your site, one of the first things you need to decide is whether you want to include the "www" in your site name and then redirect the other version of the URL to point to your site or vice versa. The simplest way you can do this using the .htaccess file.

Go to the .htaccess file in your Drupal installation folder, just add these lines, uncommenting them and altering them appropriately for your site. This will redirect visitors to the "www" version:

# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

To do the opposite, uncomment and alter:

# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This consolidates your site and causes search engine crawlers to only index one version rather than two.

The SEO Checklist module mentioned at the top of this article contains a few more modules that can help your SEO campaign, but this should give you a good start. As you build your Drupal site, it doesn't hurt to check other sites similar to yours for possible inspiration. Once you've made all the changes to the system itself, the next step is to populate your site with killer content, which is the key ingredient in driving your site ever closer to the top of the rankings.

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