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Some Drupal SEO Considerations

Drupal, Tips

Some SEO features you may want to include in your Drupal website.  Here are a few notes I took after conducting an SEO review on one of my websites.

Title Tag
A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title elements have long been considered one of the most important on-page SEO elements (the most important being overall content), and appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages, and external websites.

Here are my personal preferences for Configuration > Site information:

  • Site name: Project Name | ASU
    The page title will the render as [Page Title] | Project Name | ASU.

Metatag Description and Keywords
While most search engines now ignore the metatag keywords but the page description is still very important.  I add a teaser field to a node which I use to generate this content. Install the Metatag module.

  • Install the Metatag module with the follow submodules enabled: Metatag, Metatag verification (see below)
  • Click configuration on Metatag.
    • Global > Content select the Override link.
    • Set the Description field to your custom field in my case it is [node:field_news_teaser].
  • Site Ownership Verification
    • Enable the module Metatag verification (part of the Metatag package)
    • Follow the HOWTO links available on the documentation: https://www.drupal.org/node/1774342

XML Sitemap
The XML sitemap module creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date. The sitemap created by the module can be automatically submitted to Ask, Google, Bing (formerly Windows Live Search), and Yahoo! search engines.

  • Enable the following modules included in the package: XML sitemap, XML sitemap custom, XML sitemap engines, XML sitemap menu, XML sitemap node
  • Update your content types to rank the priority of each: Structure > Content Types > Click Edit on your content type you want to be included in the site map.
  • On the bottom configuration tabs you will click XML sitemap. Use the following settings
    • Inclusion: Included
      This indicates that this content type will be included in the site map.
    • Default priority: 0.5 normal
      The priority is the importance value of your content. Basic pages I leave at the default 0.5 normal setting. News I rank at that same value. On one website I rank Research Centers at 0.8 because this content type is the most important for the website. The default setting for the home page is 1.0 which is the highest importance.
  • Configuration Settings: Go to Configuration > Search and Metadata Section > XML sitemap and review the settings. If everything looks good you can click Rebuild Links and run that to get your initial sitemap built.
  • Click the Search Engines tab and click the Bing and Google checkboxes and save the submission settings.