A presentation about how can you get the best search results for your Drupal site.

1. Drupal SEO
Kornél Lugosi
March 26, 2010

2. Search Engine Optimization
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the
process of improving the volume or quality of
traffic to a web site from search engines via
"natural" or un-paid ("organic" or
"algorithmic") search results as opposed to
search engine marketing (SEM) which deals
with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or
higher) a site appears in the search results
list, the more visitors it will receive from the
search engine. “
Wikipedia

3. Goal of SEO

4. Goal of SEO
$

5. Keywords
Pereferably before the site building
Use 2-3+ word keywords as target

6. Content is king
Nothing’s going to save you if your content is crap

7. Drupal modules that may increase SEO
Taxonomy
Pathauto
Global redirect
Sitemap
XML sitemap
Google website optimizer
Search 404
Nodewords
Google analytics
Page title
...

8. Problems
and Solutions

9. Users can’t find shi...anything!

10. Users can’t find shi...anything!
Taxonomy
“...helps classify content on Drupal
websites.”

11. Can’t tell the content from the url
-What was that article you sent me?
-Ah, it’s
www.mysitewithunicorns/index.php?q=node/12633

12. Can’t tell the content from the url
Pathauto
-So it’s
mysitewithunicorns/Unicorns-do-exists

13. Content is available multiple times
All the same content:
yoursite.com/node/1
yoursite.com/?q=node/1
www.yoursite.com/node/1
yoursite.com/index.php?q=node/1
yoursite.com/node/1/
yoursite.com/dont-duplicate-me

14. Content is available multiple times
I think even one is too much from you...

15. Content is available multiple times
Global redirect
Always redirects you to the clean-url content.

16. Global redirect
yoursite.com/node/1
yoursite.com/?q=node/1
www.yoursite.com/node/1
yoursite.com/index.php?q=node/1
yoursite.com/node/1/
⇓
yoursite.com/dont-duplicate-me

17. Do you have a map?

18. Do you have a map?
Sitemap:
For humans
For machines

19. Sitemap for humans
Sitemap module
„...provides a site map that gives visitors an
overview of your site.”

20. Sitemap for robots
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.”

21. XML sitemap
Generates an XML with the newest content
Can ask search engines to crawl them:
Ask
Bing
Yahoo!
(Requires a webmaster account to be set up)

22. People are bored with your content

23. Find the best content

24. Find the best content
Google Website
Optimizer
„...allows you to rotate different segments of
content on your key sales pages to work out
which sections and combinations convert
the best.”

25. 404: Not found

26. Help your users find what they want
Search 404
„Instead of showing a standard "404 Page
not found", this module performs a search on
the keywords in the URL”

27. Key, Word, Words, Keywords, Wordkeys

28. Use the meta tags
Met tag keywords manipulation:
Nodewords
Integrated Metatags
„Giving more attention to the important
metadata such as keywords and description
on some of your nodes allows you to get
better search engine positioning...”

29. Measure

30. Measure
Google Analytics
„Adds the Google Analytics web statistics
tracking system to your website.”

31. So you mean... what?

32. Take care about your title
Page Title
„...gives you granular control over the page
title. „

33. Check everything
SEO checklist
„Worst module I’ve ever seen.”
Kornél

34. Markup is in the theme layer

35. Markup is in the theme layer
Use good themes with nice markup:
Zen
Stark
Zen nineSixty

36. Sign up to Webmaster tools
All search engine have one, but Google’s is the only
one worth using.
It will tell you exactly what are the problems.

37. Spam

38. Captcha!
Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell
Computers and Humans Apart

39. Captcha modules
A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often
placed within web forms to determine whether the
user is human.
Captcha module
Mollom

40. The site is slow

41. The site is slow
Google does order sites by page loading speed (not
just pure response time, javascript load times,
number of images, number of dns to resolve, etc...)

42. Speed up your site
Tons of tutorials
Last semesters presentation
http://pronovix.com/blog/
optimize-web-pages-bandwidth
http://pronovix.com/blog/
my-favorite-drupal-performance-hacks

43. I have tons of money, make something
quick!

44. Pay

45. I joined all the webrings and link
exchange networks, but still nothing

46. Webrings, link exchange
Just don’t.

47. The future
RDFa in Drupal 7
Part of Resource Description Framework
XHTML markup

48. Questions?