SEO

Drupal's currently my content management system of choice. But like virtually any CMS, Drupal needs some SEO tuning to make it more attractive to search engines.

I've set up a number of websites using Drupal, and this post will gather together some of my standard actions for optimizing. I'll try to be as exhaustive as possible on this post, starting with the basics and moving toward more complex optimization techniques.

This post, for the most part, looks at Drupal modules that can automate the SEO process for you. None of this negates the need to have an accessible theme design and to do the usual SEO activities such as building backlinks to your site. Let's get started...

Something I've hated about running community sites on Drupal is the cursed Spam Link Deterrent filter.

The idea behind this filter is that it applies rel="nofollow" to any links in user-generated content. And the reason this is necessary is that when you have a membership site and you allow users to create content on it, you inadvertently attract spammers who want to drop links back to their own site.

By applying the nofollow attribute, you are telling search engines not to count that link as 'editorially approved' - therefore, the spammer doesn't derive any value from the link. The problem with the Spam Link Deterrent is that it's an all or nothing solution - even internal links to other content on the site get this added to them. This means that your site loses a lot of value from natural internal links.

About two years ago, I decided that I wasn't going to SEO this site. Admittedly, I've deviated from this strategy subtly in the intervening time.

For a start, I ditched the Garland theme in preference of my own design, which uses XHTML, is easily crawlable and very semantically correct. I noticed the other day that somewhere along the line, I installed the nodewords module for Drupal - possibly in testing for another site - but I'm not complaining about the individualised meta tags it creates.