How to Optimize a Drupal Site for Search

With its flexible structure, Drupal provides an ideal CMS for SEO best practices. Building out an extensive site optimized for search is easy with Drupal given its customizable approach.

While earlier versions of the software were criticized for their complexity, the most recent release (7.0) has a variety of features which make it easier to optimize the software for search engines. There are several important steps to take to improve the natural search positions of your Drupal keywords, and that starts by making your content accessible through search.

One of the primary advantages of working with a LAMP-based open source CMS such as Drupal is its efficiency structure. By contrast to Flash-based sites, the PHP-based sites on Drupal are fully indexable and can help you drive effective organic traffic to your site over time.

While content and links remain king in the SEO game, this article provides an overview of important steps to optimize your Drupal-based site for a variety of search features. For startup developers and established companies, optimizing your Drupal site for search can help you generate targeted traffic to accelerate your business model.

Optimizing .htaccess, sitemap and robots.txt files

At the core of your SEO efforts for Drupal, you should work to make your site fully accessible to search. By default, many of the pages may not be fully available to search engine. There are three major files which can ensure maximum visibility for your site: your htaccess, sitemap and robots files are imperative elements of your overall search rankings. Drupal has components to enable these features so you can optimize the search presence of your site with relative ease.

There are a variety of sitemap modules for Drupal which will generate an XML file and update it based upon new content. You can submit this sitemap directly to the search engines to improve indexation of your site, as well as providing more frequent updates from search bots. When it comes to ensuring the right pages are visible, you should update the default htaccess and robots.txt files. Another important SEO customization is elimination of session IDs within Drupal, which can be accomplished through updating your .htaccess file. For the robots text file you’ll want to exclude various /directories that contribute to duplicate or private content:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /directory/

Optimizing URLs

To integrate keyword rich URLs into your site, which is a major ranking factor you should activeate the clean URL-features with apache mod rewrite. Keep in mind the naming of your directories still has SEO implications since it will impact how your URLs appear. By default, the URLs have the format of site.com/index.php?q=dir/number while a clean URL will have the format site.com/dir/number which you can update to integrate full post-names instead of Post IDs as well.

Optimizing Meta Tags

One of the most important ranking factors for search are meta tags, which are displayed prominently in search rankings:

To optimize your meta titles and descriptions, shown above, you can use some of the integrated dynamic meta tag generators for Drupal. There are meta tag modules and Page Title modules for Drupal which enable you to customize the titles and descriptions on your site.

External Links

• Drupal SEO Tutorial (video)
• Basic Drupal SEO

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