SEO - Search Engine Friendly Drupal

I am no SEO specialist... but I have seen the results of good design and bad, and I've been developing for the web for long enough to have a reasonable handle on how to design a site for pretty reasonable SEO.

Drupal, out of the box, is ok - but there are things you can do to vastly improve your chances of getting noticed when people search for what you have.

First of all, clean URLs.  You may have seen mention of them when installing Drupal.  If you didn't understand, then here is an example:

"Unclean" URLs = includes a 'index.php?q=' (This is 'out-of-the-box' Drupal)

http://essentialtech.co.nz/index.php?q=node/5

Clean URLs gets rid of the ugly bit

http://essentialtech.co.nz/node/5

To do this you need mod_rewrite installed for apache (details to come, but google it - its a common install), and some extra code in your virtual host configuration files... and switch on Clean URL's in Admin - Settings - Clean URL's

Here is an example of a virtual host configuration file that uses mod_rewrite to remove the ?q= part:

<VirtualHost * >
  ServerName    www.yourdomain.com
  ServerAlias   yourdomain.com
  ServerAdmin   webmaster@yourdomain.com
  DocumentRoot  /var/www/yourdomain/www
  ErrorLog      /var/www/yourdomain/logs/error_log
  CustomLog     /var/www/yourdomain/logs/access_log combined
  ScriptAlias   /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/

    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
      AllowOverride AuthConfig
      Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
      Order allow,deny
      Allow From all
    </Directory>

    <Directory "/var/www/yourdomain/www/">
      RewriteEngine on
      RewriteBase /
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

But of course, this still isn't particularly friendly... who really knows what /node/5 means?  So what you should do at this point is make sure you have the 'Path' option in your Core - optional section of modules ticked.  This gives you an option to change the path name for each node and give it a meaningful name:

http://essentialtech.co.nz/contact_us

Ah, now it makes sense... and it will make more sense to Google as well (Yes, there are lots of search engines out there, but who really uses anything else if they really want the answer at the moment?  Lets face it, Bing is hopeless (although it will get better I am sure), and Yahoo is... well, I don't know anyone that uses it any more.

As an important side note, Pathauto can auto-generate names for nodes based on the title, and this is a godsend for sites where you create a lot of content and dn't want to have to manually edit the URL of each on.

There is a lot more to SEO, and I will extend this article in time, but nice sensible URLs are the first step, and an important one.  I'll add details about adding a sitemap next time.  Stay tuned.