Best practices for URLs, Titles, etc for SEO

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jsibley's picture

I am redesigning my site using Drupal and am using pathauto, pagetitle, menu breadcrumb, global redirect, and other modules. I am quite new to Drupal and still getting my bearings.

Before I go live, I thought it would be helpful to decide on one pattern that would make sense to human readers and take into account SEO. I've seen pieces of this addressed, but haven't found anything that seems to cover the whole picture.

As I understand it, there are a number of places where one might have identical, or nearly identical, content when using these modules. Each location represents an opportunity for using and reinforcing keywords:

  • URL
  • Page title
  • Menu
  • Breadcrumb
  • H1 title at top of page (seems to be called just "Title")
  • Meta description (I'll include this for completeness, but think it stands more on its own in terms being generated separately and manually)

In addition, if I understand correctly, one or more of these could be derived from a taxonomy vocabulary.

Are there any best practices or favorite patterns for which of these should be the same and which should be different?

I'd appreciate any help. Also, in my particular case the content is on about 30 relatively static pages describing my services, in addition to a blog, so I don't have to worry about hundreds of product pages.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

Meta Tags module

Todd Nienkerk's picture

jsibley:

Since you're dealing with only 30 static pages and a blog, you can probably get away with relying mostly on the Meta Tags module (formerly the Nodewords module) to automatically populate meta data such as keywords, description, geoURL, etc. If you need to alter meta tags according to rules governed by the path (URL) of a particular node, view, or panel, you can also use the Meta Tags by Path module, which was developed by a colleague of mine at Four Kitchens. (Note: It's currently only available for Drupal 5.x.)

Since you specifically mention the H1 tag, I want to raise a few concerns with regards to themes and good theming practice. Many Drupal themes -- even some in core! -- use the H1 element for the site title, which is maddening from an SEO perspective. You should make sure the site title does not use an H1; instead, the page title -- i.e., the page you're currently viewing -- should use that element.

If you're good with CSS, you should also use some trickery to place the content div as close to the top of the page.tpl.php file as possible. Check out the Zen theme for a great example of how to push the sidebars and the navigation bar below the content.

Finally, to address the duplicate content concern, a combination of Pathauto, Global Redirect, and Path Redirect should eliminate all of your concerns. Global Redirect will remove the trailing slash from a URL, preventing the appearance of duplicate content at ".../my_page" and ".../my_page/". Path Redirect creates 301 redirects for nodes with multiple aliases. This allows legacy paths to be 301 redirected to the proper, preferred URL. (Warning: I have experienced some problems in the past with the combination of these three modules. I'm pretty sure these problems have been solved since then, but I urge you to browse the issues queues for Pathauto and Path Redirect in particular.)

Todd Ross Nienkerk
Co-founder, Four Kitchens

Todd Ross Nienkerk
Digital Strategist and Partner
Four Kitchens: Big ideas for the web
IRC: toddross

great info,

mattmm's picture

great info, thanks.

matthewm.org

right

pedrochristopher's picture

most issues already covered. you also need to add some extra stuff to your robots.txt because at least with my installation it left some duplicate issues. you can take a look at some of my posts on my SEO blog that touch on the robots.txt file for drupal and some related issues.

Drupal sitemap module doesnt go with robots.txt

gopisathya's picture

Drupal sitemap module doesnt obey with robots.txt
Lot of people suggest not to use sitemap.xml.

Gopisathya
http://www.ohmybaby.in

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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