Posted by van-seo on March 7, 2007 at 7:57am
Hi friends,
I am new to Drupal. I just like to know what are the basic steps to be followed in Drupal to create a search engine friendly website. Hope will hear from all of you.
I have already had a review on
http://www.smorgasbord.net/how_to_optimize_drupal_web_site_for_google_ya... - This was very helpful. Anyhow I want to learn more.
Comments
General SEO stuff
Hi Van, I'm brand new to Drupal as well but have been doing "SEO" since before the internet. ;)
I've not yet figured out how to take complete control of the URLs Drupal generates but I'm getting there. Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy my own personal "SEO Checklist" which I wrote for my first Drupal site:
http://ezinedesigner.com/ecommerce-seo-checklist.html
ChadJ
Free Site Monitor
Keyword Marketing Ladder
nofollow for contact; relativity; h1
I'm also new to Drupal, but have done some SEO - tho rarely for hotly contested terms.
Just read and enjoyed Chadj's article; some stuff I knew, but interesting re using nofollow for internal links too. Hmm, may add this here and there.
Internal links/site structure indeed important - to spread what Chadj calls the "mojo" (or something akin to google pagerank).
From what I've seen, should do this with as many links as possible to internal pages that are important, whilst having minimum number of links from any individual article page. So, might have several different menus.
Can make menus by making links via cutting n pasting URLs for pages. But Drupal can also create menu links.
One way that seems nifty to me just now is via the taxonomy context module. Can make menu for a certain "category" (taxonomy term), and choose to display it only on pages that cover this category.
Views looks potent for menus, links, too. Long way from having it really sussed, though! (got hazy ideas; better to get myself some content at this stage - after all, that's king of seo).
I also have Site Menu.
Like contextual menus, will also help users I believe.
h1 tag should be for main page title, and - apparently - only once per page. Odd to me, then, that garland has h1 for sitename and slogan; I'm yet to revise, tho figure I should sort my own theme, sometime....
Not yet sure how easy to have h1 for each page title, yet when have lists of story titles (say) ensure that these don't all have h1 tags.
Anyways, early days w Drupal for me yet. Hope these notes a little help; and maybe some Drupal SEO hotshots'll drop by to put me right and add more info.
nofollow on internal links
As mentioned in the article, using nofollow on internal links is highly controversial. I would recommend against it on internal links. Nofollow does not mean "do not follow" -- it means "do not vouch".
If you want to block robots from specific parts of your site, use robots.txt. Read more about rel=nofollow:
http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php
Nofollow should only be used on user-generated content or for sites that you don't want to vouch for.