SEO

I am not a drupal expert. About a year old, but I offer SEO along with the site to my clients which makes me write the article here. If we need to tweak Drupal to make a site as per the clients design, we end up using a lot of very useful add-on modules like the Sidecontent, Content Template, CCK, Views, Taxonomy list etc. End result, a beautiful CMS that the client can manage herself, but from teh SEO angle a horror..
1. Alinks will not work anywhere but in the [body].

I've proposed a panel session on SEO and Drupal for DrupalCon.

Ben Finklea and Greg Knaddison are going to be on the panel with me.

Please consider voting for the session.

Here is the link to the SEO/SEM document that I presented at Toronto DUG Meetup last night. It describes some of the things I've learned about SEO & Internet Marketing while developing & promoting Drupal based York Region & Toronto Real Estate website for my wife Jasmina.

I enabled the module: refine by taxonomy, http://drupal.org/project/refine_by_taxo a while back and didn't think much about it until I discovered in Google Webmaster Tools that it produced some 50.000 additional pages which of-course was indexed by Googlebot !

My site has some 6.500 nodes at the time being covering politics in Denmark with the option for 12 taxonomies on each refine by taxonomy page. I have some 500 taxonomies defined. Refine by taxonomy is currently only avialable on Drupal 5.x

I have a Drupal 5 site with the xmlSitemap module enabled.
When i look at my xml file i see node/#### for thousands of entries. However there are Aliases set up for those nodes.
What's worse is that the Alias is NOT in the xml file.

ex. of node/123 which is the about-us page
site.com/node/123 appears in sitemap.xml
site.com/about-us Does not appear in sitemap.xml

If I go to site.com/node/123 and select edit then immediately save it then the node/123 leaves the map, but the about-us does NOT appear in the map!

Recently a client contacted me with some instructions from her SEO guy. He is quite concerned that there are script tags before the meta description, keywords and robots. This data is being generated using print $head right after the print $head_title.

Example:

Mountain Climbing Expeditions | Family Adventure Travel

<!--[if lt IE 7]>

Coming from a web design and development background, one of the things that was most important to me if I was going to pursue the Drupal dream, was it's ability to be search engine friendly. 5 months later and with as many Drupal site builds under my belt, I'm now pretty confident that I have the right SEO toolset. This writeup at codegobbler.com details my top 5 modules for optimising Drupal for the search engines. What do you think? Am I missing anything?

Hi,

I've just launched a new Drupal social network (http://drupalsn.com) and i'm now actively promoting the site, but i'm hoping to spark some debate as to how everyone out there promotes their social networking sites so we can share ideas and strategies and see which ones work best!

My personal view is social networks can be hard to promote, because you obviosuly want to drive traffic to your site but you also want sign ups. Does traffic automatically mean sign ups or do you need a more specific strategy?

Adobe teamed up with Google and Yahoo! to "enhance the searchability of SWF content by helping their spiders playback SWFs in the Flash Player runtime. The project runs SWF files within web spiders and allows all contents within a SWF file to be read by both major search engines. The cool part is that this also covers dynamic data loaded in from requests to a server, these are typically ignored in both AJAX and SWF applications.

I believe in order to obtain a fairly high standard for increasing organic traffic that the modules mentioned in this Drupal SEO Tutorial should be included in nearly every site. This screencast touches on pros and cons of the modules that I would suggest. Apart from that there are many steps that themers must take as well to increase organic growth but thats another screencast!