SEO

I am pleased to announce the release of the Drupal "SEO" Checklist Module.

The "SEO" Checklist Module provides a list of good Search Engine Optimization actions that you should take to maximize the presence of your website in the major search engines. It provides little functionality itself but rather it helps you keep track of what needs to be done.

**Benefits:

Greetings! I would like to announce that SpryDev today launched the Drupal SEO Podcast at http://www.sprydev.com/podcast. Over the coming months we'll be exploring all aspects of SEO on Drupal. I wanted to start out with the basics so the first podcast is rather short and covers the Page Title module. I know that's pretty basic stuff for this crowd but we wanted to get the ball rolling and it seemed a good place to start. If you have any suggestions for future topics, please let me know.

I'm starting to build a search engine company primarily targetting small and medium businesses to a) Transition to Drupal and b) To get their SEO/SEM business. I wanted to bounce of the theme http://www.surgeboom.com. We are not even ready at alpha stage but I think the theme is coming along.

Would love to have feedback.

When starting with Drupal recently, I was a bit startled to see that - in Garland and Aberdeen themes - there were H1 tags around site title. Removed these, easily enough.

But - I'd like to use H1 for main page title, which is surely the intended purpose, and important for SEO - Google, say, figuring that the words in H1 tags are key to describing what a page is about.

I think easy enough to do for node titles. But then, might find that get several h1 tags if have a list of node titles on a page.

The great Yahoo DrupalCon, formerly know as OSCMS, was my first visit to the Mecca of Search (Sunnyvale/Mountain View) and the experience was just made complete a few days ago. A friend of mine asked me to accompany him to a meeting at the Microsoft offices in Mountain View. He was presenting one of his inventions to some Microsoft bigwigs and wanted me to come along as a technical consult. It sounded interesting...

At drupalcon I had some discussions with chad jones about adding a rel=nofollow attribute to certain links in Drupal. Specifically we discussed pages like the user login page, the feed links, and other similar links which are on most every page of every drupal site but which are not "important" pages where you want to send your "link juice".

We talked about several possible solutions to this. I brought up that it could be done at the theme level or in a module on a per site basis. Chad seemed to prefer the idea of having it in core.

Adding Semantic Web support into CCK

Motivation

I see this has already been covered a bit, but I wanted to share my own approach to dealing with Drupal's duplicate content issues. I've written a new article called How Duplicate Content Hurts Drupal Sites. In this article I outline how to use .htaccess and robots.txt to redirect and hide duplicate content from search engines, and discuss a few related modules.

A new thread on Webmasterworld may be worth a read for further thoughts re enhancing Drupal forum.

Initial post re a guy enhancing his forum software for SEO; at its heart, post says:

Simplify, simplify, simplify
Really, if there is no real need for it get it out.

(So often good practice when you're creating; Strunk n White on writing being quoted here)
A key thing being, it seems, to aim for only only the info in posts, plus titles, maybe meta tags, to be seen and indexed by search engines.