Drupal Search Engine Optimization

With the increased popularity of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies over the last few years, it's not surprising to find sources claiming that by using a Drupal CMS your site will get ranked higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results pages). However, for those who are expert in SEO, this claim falls short. Although you can execute great SEO strategies on a Drupal CMS, this does not discount the work of a SEO expert or content writer. In fact, Search Engines do not care what technology, language or CMS your site runs on.

The fact is that Drupal (more accurately modules in the Drupal community) provides non-technical users with excellent tools for entering friendly information that helps search engines crawl your site which in turn yields improved results.

However, even using the right tools and having the ability still does not translate directly into your website being ranked higher in the SERPs. Content is still king when it comes to SEO. A CMS only enables you to add your content to a website---but a human still needs to create that content! For instance, using the xml sitemap module will generate a sitemap which helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your website and keep their results up to date. But it won’t directly result in your site ranking higher for your target keywords.

Now that we’ve discussed a few important points about successful SEO strategies, we can now address what specific advantages a Drupal CMS can give you in managing that strategy.

• Drupal is configurable which allows you to make your site perfectly optimized for Google to crawl your site.
• Drupal is flexible, so when things change in the world of SEO, Drupal’s user community will update their modules to change with it.
• Drupal creates clean code that Google likes.
• It makes it easy to create landing pages so that you can optimize those pages for specific keywords.
• There are modules to identify and eliminate duplicate content, add meta-tags, create a sitemap, alias URLs to make them keyword friendly, and so on...
• There are modules to help you integrate with 3rd Party SEO tools like Google Analytics.
• There are easy to add community features, like wiki’s and blogs, that help with keeping content fresh.

The following list on the left covers modules that should be installed to help you with your optimization goals and explanations of how to use those modules to get real results.

^{footnote: Some of this content was created by Ben Finklea who spoke at Drupalcamp Colorado.}