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Daniel Sipos
04 Mar 2013

This article looks at the 10 most important SEO related modules for Drupal today. Although there are other modules out there that can contribute to the overall SEO effort, these are arguably the most critical to be kept in mind.

Drupal is a highly optimizable CMS for creating search engine friendly websites. There are a number of good modules out there that make your life much easier when it comes to this. So here we go with 10 awesome ones.

1. Page Title

In the world of SEO, page titles - the < title > tags - are among the most important, having them highly optimized being therefore crucial. In Drupal, by default, the page title is automatically given by the node.

Page Title let’s you take control over each individual node in determining the content in the tag. Additionally, you can set different patterns to be used if you choose to automate the page title creation. You cannot pretend to be doing any kind of SEO on a Drupal site without this module.

2. Pathauto

URLs are another crucial component to be considered in your SEO efforts. In Drupal, this is illustrated by the URL aliasing options that you can find in core. You can use these to make sure that your node URLs actually communicate something to the users and are not just made up by the node ID (like node/35).

But when you are dealing with a large volume of content and not every individual node’s URL must be manually written, you use the Pathauto module. Based on set patterns, this module will automatically - if you want of course - create a friendly version of the node URL. In essence, when you create a node, you can choose to manually set its URL or let Pathauto do its magic.

3. Global Redirect

OK, so you are using aliases for your URLs to get something like this: www.example.com/some-article-title instead of the default www.example.com/node/543242. That’s all good but there may be something you are not aware of.

When Drupal creates the alias, it does in fact a duplication. This means that the same node can be now accessed via both URLs. And this is a no no for search engines as they see this as a duplicate piece of content. Enter Global Redirect.

This module fixes this problem by automatically creating 301 (permanent) redirects from the old node path to the aliased one. Now you can see how Drupal starts to become invincible...

4. Redirect

As the name suggests, Redirect performs redirects from one URL to another. However, when it comes to Drupal SEO, this module handles something very important linked to the point I made before.

Say you have an aliased node path but you want to change it. However, the URL has been out on the internets for a while and people are visiting your site with it. What happens if you do make the change? Basically either people will end up on a 404 page (not found) or you will have again the problem of content duplication (if you chose to maintain 2 aliases).

With Redirect, you can set to create automatically redirects from the old path to the new one after it was changed. Good for the users, good for the search engines.

5. Meta Tags

Remember how people used to stuff the keyword meta tag to help them with the search engines? Well, the keyword meta tag is not really important anymore. However, the title and description tags are. If you operate locally, maybe even the geo tag can be useful to you.

With the Meta Tags module you can automatically create these meta tags for your nodes based on set criteria. For instance, you can have your node summary act as your description tag and the page title as the title tag. Very handy!

6. XML Sitemap

This is another very helpful one. When doing SEO, you work quite a bit with search engine webmaster tools - like the ones provided by Google, Bing, Yahoo. Helping them as much as you can to index your website’s pages is therefore an important task.

This gets much easier if you use XML Sitemap. The module creates an XML file on your server with links to all the pages on your site. Then, you submit this dynamically updated XML to the search engines so they have a better idea of what your site is made of.

The cool thing is that you have the option of including or excluding various pages or content types from this sitemap when they are created.

8. Site Verification

Before you can do anything with any of these search engine platforms, you need to be able to verify with them that you actually own the site. Now you don’t need any module to do this, but Site Verfication makes things much faster and easier. Especially if you plan to use multiple search engine webmaster software. Check it out.

8. Search 404

Don’t you just hate it when you go onto a website URL and get a 404 error that the page was not found? I do. The Search 404 module performs automatic searches based on the keyword in the URL that caused the 404. So the user experience improves if s/he gets onto a page that does not exist.

9. SEO Compliance Checker

SEO Compliance Checker runs a check after each time you create or edit a node. What it looks for is indicators of how well that particular node is optimized for the search engines. The module can be very useful especially for beginners and it can be further extended by using its API to declare new rules to check for.

10. SEO Checklist

One to rule them all. SEO Checklist was created by Drupal SEO expert from Volacci, Ben Finklea.

This module provides you with a big checklist of SEO modules you need to install and configure as well as a lot of other measures you should take to optimize your site. No Drupal site should go without this module if it wants to do a good SEO job.

Conclusion

So there you have them. 10 important modules you should keep in mind if you want to do SEO. Normally, you should use most of these modules anyway as the implications of not using them will most likely adversely affect your standing with the search engines as well as users visiting your site.

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Daniel Sipos

CEO @ Web Omelette

Danny founded WEBOMELETTE in 2012 as a passion project, mostly writing about Drupal problems he faced day to day, as well as about new technologies and things that he thought other developers would find useful. Now he now manages a team of developers and designers, delivering quality products that make businesses successful.

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Comments

Albert Martin 04 Mar 2013 15:26

Great modules!

Thanks for this post! I use almost every single one of these modules and they are absolutely crucial for good SEO on a Drupal installation. The one module I hadn't heard of before was the SEO Compliance Checker module. This seems like an awesome module.

There's always been a disconnect for me between the content creators writing good SEO "content" and the programmers implementing good SEO "structure" Without both, you're fighting a losing battle. This is a great way to keep the importance of SEO-optimized content in the attention of the content creators as they are posting.

Sinan 04 Mar 2013 16:51

Page Title vs Meta tags

Meta Tags module also gives you the ability to control page titles. So in my opinion, Page Title module is a littly bit redundant if you also want to use Meta Tags module. Meta tags does all.

Daniel Sipos 04 Mar 2013 17:44

In reply to by Sinan (not verified)

Thanks for the comment.

Thanks for the comment.

Page Title let's you take control over individual nodes in setting the title. With Meta Tags you can only automate this process with tokens..so not quite redundant.

Daniel Sipos 04 Mar 2013 20:50

Yes indeed, thanks for the

Yes indeed, thanks for the correction. Always appreciated. Sinan, you were right.

Kevin Davison 07 Mar 2013 03:02

SEO Checklist

The SEO Checklist covers everything. More like you have Top #1-9, and then #10 covers everything. I'd simply start with #10!

Daniel Sipos 07 Mar 2013 10:33

In reply to by Kevin Davison (not verified)

Indeed, it mentions all of

Indeed, it mentions all of them and a bunch of other actions you should take for a wider SEO strategy. But the purpose of this article was also to talk a bit about the modules...

And PS: it is a not a top 10 list -> SEO checklist it not number #10 in order of importance.

Thanks for the comment.

Spook SEO 19 Feb 2014 08:27

http://www.spookseo.com

The ten modules are awesome. This covers about everything. Most importantly, thank you for the checklist.

Rahul Makhija 15 Apr 2014 14:00

As I am a beginner with

As I am a beginner with Drupal, I want to know that the above mentioned Modules are for drupal 6 or 7?

Regards,
Rahul

vicky 18 Jun 2014 14:50

thnkas

I haven’t heard about the XML site map before and I think it is only from you that I came to learn more about the same. It seems that you have covered almost all the relevant data’s in this site.

Peter Macinkovic 05 Nov 2014 09:59

Suitable Module for Microdata

I was wondering if there is a suitable module for Microdata formatting.

I've used both the Scheme.org module (https://www.drupal.org/project/schemaorg) and the Microdata module (https://www.drupal.org/project/microdata) and whilst both serve some purposes (with Schemaorg being more suitable per content type), I end defaulting to manually amending block/raw html input/.tpl files in the final output.

Good post, love the website as a Drupal resource.

Regards,
Peter Macinkovic
Digital Strategy Consultant / Apex Action

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