by Colin Alsheimer from LevelTen Interactive
Many know that Drupal is one of the best content management systems in the world. But do you know why? Besides being highly adaptable and customizable, Drupal is the perfect engine for Internet marketing activities, including search engine optimization (SEO). If better SEO for your Drupal site is a priority, here are 11 essential Drupal modules you should install today.
The Content Optimizer module helps you determine if your site’s content is optimized correctly for search engines. The Content Optimizer module looks at variables like your meta page title, keywords, meta description, and important on-page factors within your page content itself. It will benchmark these variable against SEO best practices data, and tell you where you need to make changes.
The Keyword Research module helps you gather relevant intelligence about the keywords you should be targeting on your website. With the Keyword Research module, you can get reports on a phrases’ popularity in organic search, as well as related terms you may want to consider when writing content.
Much like the Keyword Research module, the Keyword Analysis module helps you get more information about target keywords on your website. However, the Keyword Analysis module uses an algorithm to extract relevant keyword phrases from your page content. These phrases can be used as inspiration for more keyword research, or, as verification that you’re on the right optimization track.
The Page Title module helps to separate your content’s page title into your content title (gets displayed to readers) and your meta page title (gets displayed to search engines). This is extremely important for SEO, as the page title is still one of the primary elements that the search engines look at when trying to rank your website.
Drupal’s Node Words module helps you control your sites meta content such as keywords, description, and other important elements. It’s a must have for any Drupal website!
The XML Sitemap module helps you create a standards compliant XML sitemap of specified content on your website. The module also makes it simple to submit your sitemap to search engines through the admin interface. XML sitemaps provide an easier way for search engines to quickly crawl your websites content.
Site verification makes it dead simple to verify your website in popular webmaster tool dashboards, including Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
The More Like This module gives you the ability to add relevant content to sections on your website. The More Like This module works by associating a “thumbprint” (typically terms / words) with a particular node, and then matching relevant content. This can be tremendously helpful when you’re trying to optimize your websites internal links.
Search 404 is one of my favorite underrated SEO modules for Drupal. While it won’t necessarily impact your site’s organic rankings, it will help keep visitors on your website in the event of a 404 error page. Instead of displaying a 404 page, the module will run a site search based on the users’ referring search terms, and return the most relevant page.
Pathauto allows you to create custom URL aliases for content on your Drupal website. For example, instead of using domain.com/node/1234 as the URL for a new blog post, you can customize it to be topically relevant, such as domain.com/blog/keyword-research
The Google Analytics module makes it easy to integrate the popular (free) web analytics platform into your Drupal website.
What are some of your favorite modules for Drupal SEO?
Colin Alsheimer is the Marketing Manager for LevelTen Interactive, a Texas based Drupal SEO Company. He also serves on the board for the Social Media Club of Dallas.