Drupal is a powerful and a highly customizable content management system allowing users to create search engine friendly websites. And without a shadow of a doubt, it is hard for a website to reach its full potential without a proper search engine optimization.
When it comes to Drupal, there are a lot of modules that you can use to tweak and improve various aspects of SEO. All these modules help developers, designers and website owners to improve the performance of a website in search results. At the same time, you should know that there is a huge list of modules and choosing from within them can be a challenge. To save you the trouble, I’ve handpicked some of the top SEO modules for Drupal to help optimize your website.
Pathauto
When you’re dealing with large volume of content, manually creating node URLs can be hard. Pathauto module helps you by automatically creating URLs for your website. The module creates these URLs based on set patterns and creates friendly versions of nodes.
Metatag
Meta keywords used to be one of the most important aspects of SEO. Now, however, Google looks through the content of your website and the links to your page. The title and description are also relevant and play an important role. With Metatag you can automatically create tags for your nodes. The module automatically provides structured metadata.
XML Sitemap
XML Sitemap module is used for useful insights into your Drupal website pages. It creates files on your server with links to all the pages of your Drupal website. Creating a sitemap helps search engines to intelligently crawl your website. This not only keeps the search engine results updated but also gives the necessary insight of your website’s pages.
Redirect
Sometimes you have to change the title of an article which means that you’re also changing the node path. But trouble arises when you change the URL since it has been on the Internet for some time and people use it to visit that specific page. With Redirect module, you can safely and automatically redirect users to a new path as it creates a permanent redirect.
SEO Checklist
As the name suggests, SEO Checklist breaks down tasks for best practices to check your website for proper SEO. The module helps in eliminating and creates a list as per the functional needs. Not only that, the list created by this module is updated regularly with the latest techniques. It also keeps track of what has already been done and places a date and time stamp next to all the tasks.
SEO Compliance Checker
The SEO Compliance Checker module runs a check and provides a feedback whenever a user makes changes to nodes or even saves or previews a node. The feedback is in regards to the search engine optimization and on the compliance of rules. You can also use its API and extend to check new rules.
Site Verification
Before you work with the search engines and the optimization of your site, you need to confirm and verify the ownership authentication. Site Verification module assists in doing and makes the whole process faster and simpler. It can be used for various search engine verifications including Google Webmaster Tools and Google Apps.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is a very important aspect of any website. Without an efficient and effective optimization, your Drupal site might never reach its full potential. You can make use of the aforementioned modules or read the blog post by us on SEO Tips For Drupal to improve the visibility of your web pages on search engine results.
Hamza Zia
Hamza is a Drupal Community Manager at Cloudways - A Managed Drupal Hosting Platform. He loves to write about Drupal and related topics. During his free time, he can be seen obsessing over Football, Cars, Android and Gaming.
