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...

I am continually making striving to improve the design of our community site, Unreality Shout. I'm quite fond of the grid-based design, but there's usually something that needs refined or improved.

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.

Drupal's default way of displaying categories really bugs me. They compile all the categories into an unordered list, which adds a lot of pointless complexity to the theme.

Coming from the WordPress school, I'd much prefer to have a comma-separated list of categories. Well, after an epic battle with my node.tpl.php file and much searching on the Interwebs, I've come up with a solution. It's based heavily on a code snippet used in this Lullabot article.

When I set this blog up, my intention was not to go overboard on SEO or anything like that, so I created a basic set of categories, none of which were particularly keyword-rich. The list of categories stands at:

If you were reading a couple of weeks back, I was musing about the effectiveness of minimalist blog designs and their impact on search engine optimisation.

I'm working on a Drupal theme at the minute where I need to work out whether a user is is logged in (or not) and show them a message accordingly. One such scenario is user invitations:

At the current time, I've been a member of the Drupal.org website for 4 weeks shy of 3 years. I mention this because I had an awkward moment on the Drupal forum when an (obviously long-term) Drupaller showed his disdain for me for not contributing in all the time I'd been using Drupal.

If you've ever installed the TinyMCE module for Drupal (or indeed the WYSIWYG module which seems to be the preferred way forward), you'll have noticed that the default font size is miniscule. My first concern as a web designer is usability. How hard is it to read and edit?

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.