Top Drupal SEO Modules, Tips and Tricks to increase traffic

Drupal is one of the most SEO friendly CMS. In fact I attribute the success of Drupal CMS to its search engine friendliness. I was surprised when my first Drupal site was quickly indexed by google without much effort from my side. Today I have 90%+ traffic from search engines. Hence I attribute my website’s success to Drupal’s SE friendliness. Chances are that you have landed on this page via search engine too 🙂

Let’s see how you can quickly harness the power of Drupal to get your site indexed and get top rankings in Search Engines.

  1. Enable Clean URLs (Administrator > Site Configuration > Clean URLs) With Drupal’s “clean URLs” feature www.mydrupal.com/?q=/seo-tips becomes www.mydrupal.com/seo-tips
  2. Use Path Module : The path module lets you create URL aliases for your Drupal pages. By default, Drupal automatically creates web addresses like www.mydrupal.com/?q=node/52, which many people feel are not user-friendly. Also search engines will give better rankings to pages that have more human-friendly URLs, especially if they include relevant keywords – for instance, http://www.mydrupal.com/?q=drupal_showcase_some_top_drupal_sites
  3. PathAuto Module: The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system which the administrator can control
  4. Use XML Sitemap module : XML Sitemap automatically creates a site map that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date.
  5. Configure Meta Tag module : Giving more attention to the important keywords and/or description on some of your nodes allows you to get better search engine positioning. This module allows you to set some meta tags for each node, view or panels page.
  6. Add Custom Breadcrumbs module : If you have a blog site and node called “Drupal SEO Tips” To create this, I use the Views module to create a page at /blog that displays all the node types “blog post.” Whenever a user views a blog post I want the breadcrumb to show Home > Drupal SEO Tips instead of simply Home. To do this I would simply type “Drupal SEO Tips” in the titles field and and “blog” in the paths field and save my breadcrumb. Then, the first item in the breadcrumb would say ” Drupal SEO Tips” and link to the path “blog” (the location of views page that lists blog posts).
  7. Add related links module : Linking articles of your own site is one of the great SEO Tricks. It gives importance to your site articles. To achieve this automatically you can use this module. Displays links related to content. The related links module enables nodes to display related URLs to the user via blocks. Related links can be defined in 3 ways:
  • Parsed links: links that are retrieved from the body of a node.
  • Manual links: links that are added manually.
  • Discovered links: links that are discovered by the module using various
    criteria, including the category terms of a node and suggestions provided by
    the search module (when enabled).
  1. Alinks Module: Same principle as above. Linking your site’s article for better SEO. This module will create automatic links. Allows users to associates defined text to links.
    This module is based on the wordpress module “alinks”. Very easy to use, just enter your normal content and setup the terms/links you want on your site through the administration interface. Main features: – Replace terms in the content body with alink.
  • Does not change the node body as it is executed on display only.
  • Can set the amount of occurrence to change.
  • Can set on which content type it will be affected
  1. Search 404 module: Redirecting the 404 page or Page not found to appropriate page on your site will ensure that you do not lose traffic. Instead of showing a standard “404 Page not found”, this module performs a search on the keywords in the URL, e.g. if a user goes to http://mydrupal.com/does/not/exist, this module will do a search for “does not exist”. It includes beta stage search engine keywords detections.
  2. Url List Module:
    Creates a list of node URLs at /q=urllist.txt or (/urllist.txt for clean URLs) for submitting to search engines like Yahoo! Site Explorer. urllist.txt is listed as a valid feed for submitting all your site’s URLs through your collection of “My Sites” at Yahoo!. Yahoo has some history of buggy anonymous submission, so you often have to be logged in to your Yahoo! account to submit your site to their Site Explorer service. As of version 5.x-2.0, URL list supports automatic update submission through the Yahoo Update Notification service.
  3. Design XHTML layout to make it fast loading and SEO friendly
  4. Add Google Analytics to your site. This way you can see the top keywords for your site, your top entry and exit points, who is driving traffic to your site. In a nutshell what is working and what’s not.
  5. Reduce size of your CSS code by rewriting css. Use this free online tool
  6. Avoid Duplicate URLs – Global redirects module . Here is a detailed article on how to remove duplicate URLs in Drupal site

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