A Guide to Drupal SEO

Drupal has quickly become my favorite CMS for its flexibility and feature-set. Even for a basic site or a general blog I now use Drupal. Creating pages, polls, posts and administering permissions is very easy. Out of the box Drupal does a lot very well, and with just a few adjustments, it's a powerful SEO platform.

Below is a rundown of what I typically do after a standard Drupal installation to get the most SEO value out of it, including modifications to themes, modules I install, and a few other tidbits.

Modifying the Theme

Drupal themes can be built in various ways and still function, so some of what I recommend doing may not strictly apply to the theme you are using, but if you understand how your theme is built, and the html & php code it's built upon, you should be able to make the necessary adjustments.

First I set the theme to "Default" and make a test post so that I can test the changes I make. Like any CMS theming engine, these changes can have unforeseen consequences, so I want to see (both the front-end and code) what really happens.

Now I take a look at what heading tags the theme has generated. I find a lot of themes wrap the site's logo, name, and sometimes every post listed on the front page in an H1 tag. I remove the heading tags from the logo, and my goal with posts is to have their titles as H1 tags when viewing their respective internal URLs, but have them as H2 tags when listed with teasers on the index page (or any other page which lists multiple posts).

To do the above I need to edit the page.tpl.php and node.tpl.php files (again, it is possible for this to vary depending on theme, but these files are included in any well-made, compliant, Drupal theme).

To remove the heading tag from the logo/site name look for the code which calls them, or do a search for the heading tag it appears wrapped in in your site. Not all themes handle this the same, some may call either the site-name or the logo, others may display both. It'll look something like this:

You can just remove the open and close heading tag, but that may result in the text (site-name) looking a bit funky (this isn't a problem if your utilizing the logo and not site-name option). If you are using the site-name feature in Drupal, you'll want to add CSS styling to make it appear like it did with the heading tag.

Now I need to fix the post titles. To get them to appear as H1 tags when viewing their full posts (not the titles on the index) I need to edit the page.tpl.php file by wrapping the print title command in the H1 tag:

This will help those pages rank organically. But now I want them to appear as H2 headings on the index page so they don't detract from what I will set as the H1 tag there.

In the node.tpl.php file I wrap the call for the title in an H2 tag:

This hasn't identified anything as the H1 tag, or created any unique text, for the index page. To do that I do one of two things. Some themes allow for the incorporation of Drupal's "Mission Statement", which is simply text placed on the index page. I can code an H1 tag in there along with nice keyword-rich content by selecting the "Input Type" of "Full HTML". For themes that do not have the mission statement coded I can either add it:

Or I can place that same H1 tag and content in a Block, and set that block to appear above the posts on the index page only.

Now I view my site's index page and a post's page and check the code to ensure it has worked...which it should.

HTACCESS

Now that I'm happy with my heading tags I'm going to edit the htaccess file to redirect all users to the www version of my domain name. All I need to do is uncomment the code Drupal provides, and change the example to my domain name:

Drupal SEO Modules

I need to install a number of modules to achieve everything I want, so now I'll upload the following modules to /sites/all/modules:

pathauto
global_redirect
nodewords
page_title
path_redirect
xml sitemap

It's important that some of the configuration of these modules happen before creating any content, or even any taxonomy terms. For example, I need to configure pathauto to output the URLs I want for my vocabularies before any of those terms are added. If I were to, for example, add a vocabulary called "States" and then created terms for all 50 states, the URLs for those would be sometime like TAXONOMY/TERM/1. But if I enable pathauto and identify the URL structure for my States vocabulary first, then when I add the 50 states later they will automatically have the URLs I wanted.

Here's a rundown of each module and why I'll use it.

pathauto. This module is an absolute necessity. I don't like the system URLs that are typically generated. By using this module I can create URLs that are search-friendly, including words that I'm targeting. If I had a Vocabulary of "Earth", terms of each country, and sub-terms (child terms) of each state/province and city, pathauto would automatically create the URLs "/united-states/california/los-angeles", "/spain/madrid" and so on by using [catpath-raw] in the "Taxonomy term path settings".

I can also change my blog url from "blog/1" to simply "blog", and have page URLs be "page-title" instead of "content/page-title". Additionally, if I have an active community site I can change the system generated user paths to something more friendly like "user/dan", and have the URLs for forum posts include the title of the post to help it rank for long-tail phrases.

global_redirect. Another must-use. This will automatically perform a 301 redirect to the clean URL (like those created by pathauto) whenever there is a request for the system URL. It also has an option to "Deslash" URLs so you don't end up with duplicate content issues with both "domain.com/page" and "domain.com/page/" indexed. I did recently have the "Remove Trailing Zero Argument" (the "/0" that often appears after term URLs) option disabled and it resulted in some duplicate content. Before you enable the /0 option, however, you should understand the implications.

page_title. While the page titles of posts generally don't need much tweaking, this module allows you to set patterns for your Drupal content types (pages, blog posts, stories, articles...). You can also create a unique title for your index page here.

nodewords. This allows you to create meta data for each piece of content you create. There's a number of tags you can set, from robots, copyright, revisit after to the basic keywords and description among others. For many sites I utilize nodewords simply for the meta description. It's better to write my own description than to have Google use a snippet from the page to present to a searcher.

path_redirect. When moving from another CMS, or a static site, to Drupal you can identify old pages for path_redirect to 301 redirect to new ones. This will help reduce the loss of any link juice pointing to those pages, and help the reindexing of the site.

xml_sitemap. This simply creates an xml sitemap that you can submit to the search engines.

Another technique I like to use is to create blocks which have internal links in them with keyword anchor text. For example, if I have a site on the United States, I would likely want to capture as much traffic to the major cities as possible. So I might link to my Los Angeles page with appropriate anchor text within a block that appears on all other California city pages. Within that same block I could link to San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, or any other California city I was focused on.

A last technique which is powerful is to utilize your menu system. Many themes come with suckerfish/superfish (basically just drop-downs) menus. I can create links to my most valuable pages with good keyword anchor text and place them in a menu. Now these links will appear on every page of my website! Don't discount the power of your own links.

Update:

Adding nofollow to 'Create new account' and 'Request new password' Links

I've wanted to do this, but needed the motivation...which I thankfully got from the SEOBook.com forum.

Adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the login form links ("Create new account" and "Request new password") is easy, but does require changing code in Drupal's core, so you do this at your own risk.

That done, here's how.

Open the modules/user/user.module file in Notepad or some other text editor. Find the below:

$items[] = l(t('Create new account'), 'user/register', array('attributes' => array('title' => t('Create a new user account.'))));
}
$items[] = l(t('Request new password'), 'user/password', array('attributes' => array('title' => t('Request new password via e-mail.'))));

and change to:

$items[] = l(t('Create new account'), 'user/register', array('attributes' => array('title' => t('Create a new user account.'), 'rel' => t('nofollow'))));
}
$items[] = l(t('Request new password'), 'user/password', array('attributes' => array('title' => t('Request new password via e-mail.'), 'rel' => t('nofollow'))));

Update: 2

Adding nofollow to "Login" and "Register" Links for Commments

Again, this involves a slight tweak to the core files of Drupal, so 1) use at your own risk, and 2) every time you upgrade you'll need to make the change.

To add the "nofollow" attribute to the two links in "Login or register to post comments", example from this page:

Open /modules/comment/comment.module

Find:

if (variable_get('user_register', 1)) {
// Users can register themselves.
return t('<a href="@login">Login</a> or <a href="@register">register</a> to post comments', array('@login' => url('user/login', array('query' => $destination)), '@register' => url('user/register', array('query' => $destination))));
}

and replace with:

if (variable_get('user_register', 1)) {
// Users can register themselves.
return t('<a rel="nofollow" href="@login">Login</a> or <a rel="nofollow" href="@register">register</a> to post comments', array('@login' => url('user/login', array('query' => $destination)), '@register' => url('user/register', array('query' => $destination))));
}

Easy. This should also work on these links that appear on teasers, but note this only works for sites set to allow users to register themselves.

I hope that helps others utilizing Drupal to get the most out of the very cool CMS. Hit me up with any questions.