If you are new to SEO, these videos are a great introduction to the essential Drupal modules that will enhance your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign. You will learn the basics of analytic metrics and webmaster tools in order to conduct effective keyword research for the best keywords for your SEO campaign.

Watch and learn how to optimize your title tags, meta tags, sitemaps and more using various Drupal modules. Also, according to the course description, you will learn how to “configure built-in Drupal settings to properly set up your header tags, content silos, menu system, robots.txt and Apache rewrite rules. You’ll learn to measure your site’s compliance and performance before laying out the next steps for your SEO campaign to maximize your site’s conversion rates.”

For more information about these Drupal SEO videos, check out the introductory video below.

1.) Introduction
2.) SEO Checklist Module
3.) Setting up Google Analytics
4.) Using Google Webmaster tools
5.) Researching keywords
6.) On-page optimization
7.) Customizing page titles
8.) Customizing menu paths
9.) Redirecting menu paths
10.) Implementing relevant meta tags
11.) Optimizing for local businesses
12.) HTML header tags
13.) Creating content silos
14.) Leveraging the menu system
15.) Creating & submitting sitemaps
16.) Controlling access with robots.txt
17.) Setting up .htaccess rewrite rules
18.) Testing standards compliance
19.) Importance of site performance
20.) Testing with SEO graders
21.) Conversion rate optimization
22.) Next steps for an SEO campaign
23.) Conclusion

Download the Drupal SEO videos here.

Let us know how you are using Drupal or if you need help optimizing your website for search engines.

Contact the Schipul SEM Team in Houston for more information.

Jen Lampton and Rob Bertholf from Chapter Three gave a basic rundown of SEO in Drupal sites at DrupalCon. You can watch their presentation on the session page if you’d like. Along with the session, they write a quick blog post to bring their holy grail for Drupal SEO (pdf) document. It reviews some of the best practices for common SEO actions and included what modules are needed for those things. I’d like to dive in a bit deeper on some of my favorites from that list.

One of the best features of the document is that it separates out what things benefit Humans (like you), and what benefits Robots (like Google). For instance, alt text for images benefits the Robots by giving some context to images, but it was really designed to benefit Humans that use screen readers or other accessibility aides.

Rob discussed this early on in the presentation and pushed the audience to only make changes that benefit Humans. If it only benefits the Robots, it’s probably a black-hat tactic. I could not agree more, and am thankful he highlighted this distinction. Aside from nofollow links, robot meta tags, and the robots.txt, everything else on their list benefits humans. So Human-only isn’t a hard a fast rule, but it should be the majority of your focus.

The majority of things that you would optimize on the site should make things easier for the user. This includes:

• A Consistent site structure (code and visually) and both XML and HTML Sitemaps
• Use descriptive Headings and Titles for your pages, articles, and other types of content
• Good internal Site Search and helpful error pages
• Alt and title text for images and link title text to add more information

There are a few others on the list, but those above are the most important for the Humans. Those are the basics, and should be used before any other tweaks are even considered.

After the basics are covered, you can start to get more focused on special things like keyword selection, link text (e.g. not “read more” or “click here”), and setting up patterns and defaults for your URLs, Title tags, and Meta descriptions. Much of this can be setup to be automated whenever new content is added, and overridden when you need to make a specific change to something. Finally, you can use some special redirect modules (path redirect and global redirect) to make sure your content has one specific URL.

If you’ve accomplished everything above, you are far ahead of the pack. Remember again that you should be optimizing for the Humans, and not just the Robots. Another recommendation by the Chapter Three team is to use social media sharing embed tools to allow for easy community sharing. This, like many things, is good in moderation. Use you Analytics reports (you installed analytics tracking, right?) to find some of your top referring sites and use those share buttons on your content. We use a ShareThis tool which has several options, but does not display all of them everywhere. It’s not the greatest tool, but it brings some balance.

Finally, I want to discuss the notion of active vs. passive content. Active content is stuff that may change often, and will hopefully be shared and earn linkbacks. A great example of this is a blog. Blog posts give you little bits of content that other people can link to and send traffic to your site. Passive content is generally pages on your site like your About or Contact page. They won’t change often, and while the may get some traffic, they probably won’t get many linkbacks. You will hopefully have a mix of passive and active content on your site. Doing this will give you different types of traffic as well as linkbacks for your site.

Thanks again Jen and Rob for sharing your knowledge and experiences.

SEO Drupal Modules

Pathauto – Creates automatic URL aliases based on patterns created by the Token module. Includes options for taxonomy, user, content types, and others.  This module is very flexible and allows you to modify the URLs for any page on the site.

XML Sitemap – Creates a sitemap based on the sitemaps.org spec.  Also allows for submission to search engines with the required api keys. An XML Sitemap is the best way to show the search engines of new content on your site and this module can create that sitemap very easily for you.

Google Analytics – This is a fully loaded analytics tracking solution.  Just imput the UA number for your site and the tracking code will be included on every page. Allows for blocking tracking on certain pages, tracking by role, downloads, and other metrics.

Page Title – Similar to Pathauto, but for meta Title Tags.  You can setup patterns for different pieces of content. It also allows the option for a user to override and individual page’s Title Tag.

Global Redirect – Creates 301 redirects for different urls on the same site, like node/1, node?q=1, and /about-us/. This is great for making sure you aren’t splitting your rank between different URLs for the same page. Global Redirect also makes sure your URLs are all uniform by stripping the final “/”. This is a great help in Google Analytics reports so you know that every pageview is counted appropriately.

Nodewords – This allows you set meta description and keywords for individual nodes and views. Newer beta versions also include the ability to add a meta confirmation tag for Google Webmaster Tools. This way you do not need to edit your templates or upload a file.

SEO Checklist – This module is a great place to help keep track of all of the above modules and more. There are quite a few things that can be setup to automate your site’s SEO performance. SEO Checklist helps you keep all of these things straight.

Drupal SEO Performance

Because of these wonderful modules, Drupal is regarded as one of the top performing CMS platforms for SEO. With the tools above, you are able to configure everything to run in the background, so you can focus on your pages and your content and not have to worry too much about the technical details.

Other CMS platforms are able to accomplish some of these things, but very few if any are able to do everything for CMS that Drupal does with these modules. The other SEO benefit is that as search engine optimization changes, the Drupal community can adapt and quickly update the modules. The Drupal admin system can notify you of updates to you modules to make sure your site is kept up-to-date.

Schipul offers custom Drupal designs and is also able to do Drupal development for the site of your dreams. And of course, all of this great SEO configuration is included.