Introduction to Drupal 7 - SEO

Introduction to Drupal 7

Bonus session

Drupal SEO

1 Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) Drupalist: Kalin Chernev

Agenda

• Drupal and SEO

• SEO Checklist module

• Other good practices

2 Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) Drupalist: Kalin Chernev

Drupal and SEO

• As a content management system and framework, Drupal offers you great possibilities for on-page SEO optimizations;

• On-page and/or off-page optimizations will not bring you any business results if your keywords research is not correctly

• In our Drupal course scope, we will not deal with keywords research and targeting, only with the Drupal capabilities for SEO

Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 3

SEO factors for success - general

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On-page factors for SEO success

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Title, description and URL lengths

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SEO Checklist

• SEO Checklist was initially developed by Volacci and then ported by Blink Reaction

• The module does not optimize your website by itself. It rather gives you a list of good modules to use to optimize your system.

• You don’t need to install and configure all listed modules, only those you consider really useful for your project case

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Using the SEO Checklist module

• Administration > Configuration > Search and metadata > SEO Checklist

• URL: admin/config/search/seochecklist

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Page titles

• Absolutely vital to have

• Requires the token module

• The best pattern you can use is {page title} | {site name}

• Put target keywords in the beginning

• Avoid stop words as “in”, “the”, “at”, etc.

• Good to be less than 65 symbols of length

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URL paths

• Another absolutely important feature to setup

– Clean URLs – removes the ‘?q=‘ from the URLs

– Pathauto – sets good URLs based on tokens

– Global redirect – removes the back slash ‘/’ from the end of URLs – avoids duplication

– Redirect module – provides webmasters nice and healthy way to manage redirects

• URLs are good if kept under 65 symbols overall

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Search engine accounts

• Google account is enough

• Focus on optimization for google is pretty ok

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Tracking your visitors

• Google analytics tracking – With a module: Google Analytics Module;

– The module will give you options

– You can also paste the GA code directly in your html.tpl.php template file

• Other tracking and analytics options: – Piwik;

– Open web analytics;

– Clicky;

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Page content

• For meta tags management, Meta tags quick module is not good, better use Meta tags;

• Scheduler module is good if you plan to publish a lot of content, and you want to do it time-based portions, better crawleability;

• HTML Purifier – I wouldn’t use it honestly; • Search 404 – search instead of 404 errors; • Read more link – not really useful; • SEO Compliance Checker – useful sometimes, i.e.

if your client is crazy on SEO topics; Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 13

Clean code

• Website validation with the http://validator.w3.org/ is good; if you don’t manage to clear all notifications and warnings, don’t worry;

• Links validations with the http://validator.w3.org/checklink is also good, really try to clean this one

Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 14

Submitting your website

• Again: focus on Google!

• Make use of the XML Sitemap module – this is the standard way to communicate changes to search engines with a site map;

• Authenticate at Google Webmaster Tools and validate it in any way, no modules needed;

• Submit your xml sitemap to Google

• That’s it, no need for anything more!

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Social media

• This is not really so much SEO, more into the ORM (online reputation management);

• If you have only 1-2 social media on your website, use them separately as widgets, no modules are needed;

• If you have many social networks on you site, better use Add to Any service or any other service which combine them into 1 place;

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Protecting your website

• Again: not so much into the SEO, rather this is a topic of your website security;

• General principles:

– Machine generated passwords;

– Captcha-s on web forms

– Sessions

– Input formats

– Folders permissions

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Geographic

• Haven’t used them so far

• Could be managed with the Meta tags module

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Performance

• Yes, your website performance is important for your better SEO results;

• Your website performance can be measured through you Google Webmaster Tools;

• There is a lecture about Performance

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Time for questions

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Contacts

Kalin Chernev

– E: kalata@shtrak.eu

– T: twitter.com/kalinchernev

– U: http://shtrak.eu/kalata

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