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Introductory lecture on Drupal 7 SEO and mainly using the SEO Checklist module.
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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
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 4
On-page factors for SEO success
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 5
Title, description and URL lengths
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 6
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
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 7
Using the SEO Checklist module
• Administration > Configuration > Search and metadata > SEO Checklist
• URL: admin/config/search/seochecklist
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 8
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
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 9
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
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 10
Search engine accounts
• Google account is enough
• Focus on optimization for google is pretty ok
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 11
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;
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 12
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!
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 15
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;
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 16
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
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 17
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
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 19
Time for questions
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 20
Contacts
Kalin Chernev
– E: [email protected]
– T: twitter.com/kalinchernev
– U: http://shtrak.eu/kalata
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