SEO

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.

I've been reading a lot of threads about the importance of the "Category" module (http://drupal.org/project/category) for search engine optimization (SEO).

As I understand it, the Category module enables a webmaster to control the (1) body text, (2) meta description, and (3) page title included on category/index pages (pages which are otherwise NOT nodes). Because category/index pages are the most likely (other than the home page) to be ranked high by Google, this enables you to tweak these three elements for superior search engine placement.

I hope it's ok to post this here. I first posted this question in the support forums -- but it was suggested that I post here instead since it's a path question.

I'm totally new to Drupal but experienced in SEO and PHP. I've always rolled my own crappy CMS because of custom needs. I'm REALLY hoping Drupal will help me to stop this wasteful methodology.

I wanted to raise the flag on a potential SEO problem with Drupal 4.7.5 and Drupal 5.0 with regards to 404 Page not found.

The issue has been discussed in detail and several patches have been put on the table. Here's where you can have your say and get involved in the action:

http://drupal.org/node/90780

I'm wondering if there would be a way to create a module that would do 301 redirects from static pages to Drupal pages.

That is, if I have a site constructed of old html pages, and I upgrade the client to Drupal, I am in theory faced with having to cut and paste the content from the old page into a node form of some sort. This is fine.

However, in order for the page rank of this old html page to be maintained, I need to point SEs to the new node rather than the old page.

Would it be possible to do this with a module?

Relating to this: http://drupal.org/node/16084

Here's my first pass at a 'checklist' for Drupal & SEO. I know some or all of this has been covered elsewhere, but I'd like to see a simple list. If a good one exists elsewhere, please provide a URL and we can just point to that.

For instance, what modules and configuration are 'must have' for SEO purposes? (I'll add links as time permits)

Currently, when you use a URL path alias to an existing node, and later decide to change the URL alias, the old path 'breaks' - so, if you have an older page that has inbound links from, say, Google search or some web directory, people will get a 404 error - not good for SEO or building traffic, in my experience.

See here:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Yahoo_and_Microsoft_rally_behind_sitema...

There is now a very compelling reason to polish (and use) the sitemaps module that we had developed in 2005 as a Summer of Code project.

I am a web architect and a system analyst. Now, I've translated Drupal To Hebrew and initiated the creation of a drupal community in Israel. Following Gábor Hojtsy's request, Here is a use-case analysis of my expernece from the Hebrew Translation of Drupal, and with it's implementation on tens of sites, with indexation for search engine relevancy.

Recently, I've tried the Internationalization module on two of my sites, but gave it up and decided to wait for a later time. Problem is that i18n is not yet compatible with many other modules. I am a heavy user of taxonomy / category modules. The i18n module is a big step forward, but more work is needed. I need language specific taxonomy with menu integration. On one site, I have tried to use the taxonomy module, but found that the vocabulary names are not translated (nither in the node entery screens nor in the menu). On the other site, I tried to use the new category module but discovered that the node input form (and the menu) displayed all categories without language distinction.

Well, I just found about this group (and groups.drupal.org) today, and I've been using Drupal for over a year! I see this group for SEO has 59 subscribers, and yet I hadn't seen any posts from any of you on seo in the main drupal forums. Why is that? If I had seen mention of this before, I would have joined as soon as I found out - and there are questions that people are asking all the time about SEO in the main forums that deserve answers. I've been trying to answer all the ones that I can find.

I posted twice in the last month in the main forums to solicit input regarding an article I wrote on my web site: How to Optimize a Drupal web site for Google and other Search Engine Crawlers. I was surprised to find I didn't get a shred of feedback. The post has been viewed almost 1,200 times on my site and I've not gotten any feedback there either.