Lessons In Drupal: Search Engine Optimization and the Drop
In this lesson I will talk about some of the options Drupal offers in its core system, and some of the addon modules that you can download from the Drupal community. These settings when enabled and tweaked will provide you with the opportunity to gain a better rank in major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask Jeeves). I say major search engines because many "web design" companies are only worried about Google, when in fact, much of your traffic is generated by all major search engines, not just Google. Although, Google is a very powerful search engine, you wouldn't just advertise a product to one specific demographic would you? That would be like only submitting your website to Google.
The first setting included in Drupal that you should enable when first installing is the "Clean URL" option. With this enabled it will provide you with better search engine friendly URLs that will look like http://www.yoursite.com/about, and so on. Each section's name will change with the title provided for it through the administration section. This makes it easier for the search engine bot to read the URL. Some content management systems have URLs that like like, http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?uid=about. It is these pages that are hard for a search engine bot to read and understand.
The second setting that you need to configure in the administration area would be under the "Site information." The area you need to fill in is the "Site slogan", this will be displayed in the title of your webpage at the top of the browser. An SEO trick is to have relative keywords included in this part of your website so that a search for any of the terms will output your site listing. These two features in Drupal are very useful to web designers.
The Drupal community is full of modules that you can search for, a search for SEO rendered 2 pages worth of possible modules. Recently I discovered a module that goes by the name of "XML Sitemap." The idea behind this module is great. I have actually installed the development version of it on my site, and so far it has worked flawlessly. What does a sitemap do for you? Basically it is an XML file (Don't worry about what that means) and in the contents of this file is some markup that tells search engines locations of your pages, titles, and any other information you think the search engine should know. Through the XML Sitemap options panel you have the settings of giving pages, posts, blogs, etc. priority. This helps the search engine designate what is more important. Sitemaps are generally for large websites, however, I believe they are a very useful SEO tool and won't do any damage to a smaller website. You are also able to submit your sitemap XML to the search engines, and input the verfication codes into the XML Sitemap settings. Here are some helpful links to get you started. Even if you don't have Drupal, I would suggest making your own sitemap and using some of the tools that search engines offer.
