Drupal Modules to Utilize for SEO

Drupal and its contributed modules have proved to be a useful system for website SEO, making it clear cut and simple to configure and/or automate URLs, page titles, and meta data. Below are several contributed Drupal modules in order to jump on the Drupal SEO module bandwagon.

Pathauto

By default, with Clean URLs turned on, Drupal generates content with URLs such as "node/1". The Pathauto module gives you the ability to create aliases automatically when posting content. For example, when I submit a blog post on LevelTen's website, the title of my post is automatically created into a URL alias. Using the Tokens module and configuring Pathauto settings, you can specify URL patterns for different content types. On the LevelTen website, we have several patterns set up depending on the content type. In the image below you can see the variations for our Portfolio content types.

Global Redirect

Given the Pathauto module creates an additional path for your content, it may look sneaky to search engines - the content looks duplicated as it is also accessible by the node number. The Global Redirect module redirects the node number paths to the aliases preventing search engine confusion.

Page Title

Drupal lets you specify titles for nodes, or content on your site, but the Page Title module gives you power over a different page title. Page Title allows you to control the title the search engine pick up and that users see in results and in their browser bar. Just like Pathauto, you can specify patterns using Tokens, to automatically create Page Titles, but often you will want to customize the title you want search to pick up.

Meta tags

The Meta tags, or Nodewords module allows you to set meta tag keywords and descriptions for your content. It is argued that meta keywords are not valuable in SEO, but at the very least, descriptions are useful to users browsing search results.

Content Optimizer

Developed by LevelTen's very own, Tom McCracken, the Content Optimizer module analyzes your Page Title, Body, and Meta tags against SEO best practices and makes recommendations on what to improve. These have been some of the essential Drupal tools our team has utilized to optimize clients' websites and even our own. To get the most out of them, I suggest reading about the theory and/or best practices for SEO. Below are recommended articles: SEO Basics by Web Design from Scratch The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet by SEOmoz Complete List of Best SEO Tools by Smashing Magazine