Friday, 18 November 2011

Drupal 7 Seems to be Great for SEO

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A few days ago Google updated the visible PageRank for websites. I got a pleasant surprise when I checked it for Drupal Mill. It went directly from 0 to 5 (10 is max), which I can only assume is pretty good. I am by no means an SEO expert, but regularly read articles that catch my eye on the topic. Thus, I got a fair idea what is involved and what you need to think of both when building sites and creating content for it.

On the site building front I have done very little, basically the only SEO modules, outside Core, that is used are Pathauto and Page Title. There are many more modules available, but they are either not ready for production sites or I haven't got to them yet.

That makes it even more interesting that the PageRank got so high for such a new and small site as this. After all, its only half a year since I made it live and there isn't very much content on it yet.

A lot of so called SEO experts say that the PageRank for a site is constantly updated and that when Google makes an updated that is publicly visible it should not really affect the site. I'm not to sure about that. The same day as Drupal Mill got its PR5, the number of search referrals hit a new record, the day after it was even higher. Same goes for the number of visitors, it more than doubled compared to the average before the update. I have seen this happen on other sites as well, so I don't buy that these updates don't affect traffic to a site.

Drupal 7 seems to be great for SEO

Since I also use Google Webmaster-Tools on all sites, I can see where various keywords are ranking. Its quite a few that is ranking high there and generates traffic. GWT lags a few days behind so it doesn't say anything about the number of SERP impressions DM got since the 27th when the update was made.

My hunch is that Drupal 7 is more SEO friendly than previous versions and that the RDF inclusion (I only use the default settings still)  in Core has an impact as well. Then combined that with thinking twice when creating the patterns in Pathauto and the titles for content makes a good base.

Another reason I can think of is that I have so far focused on trying to provide good unique content, not quantity. Due to limited time, in combination with that I am waiting for some modules to be ready, I haven't got to add more structure, content types and features here yet. It will come soon though, so it will be interesting to see what happens at the next update.

Yesterday SEOptimes published an article about 30 ranking factors that they believe affects the PageRank, or not. When I read it, I was happy to notice that a lot of how I do things is on their list of methods that they believe does affect it. Those I have skipped is gladly on the list that doesn't.

So, getting fixaded with maximising SEO on a site is something I am glad I have been able to avoid. The search engines are far to good today, and getting better, to make that a big waste of time. Better is to focus on creating good unique content and spice it with being clever using the right modules to automate the rest as much as possible. Plus, I want to focus on producing content for people like you to read, not machines.

Have you noticed any difference for your Drupal 7 site since the 27th? Especially interesting is if you have a site that has been updates from earlier Drupal version and if that has made any dramatic changes in the PageRank and search traffic to your site.

from
http://www.drupalmill.com/commenhttp://www.drupalmill.com/comment/163t/163

Drupal SEO

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Drupal SEO involves a myriad of activities. Starting from selecting the right category name/Page name to the SEO friendly URLs it covers a number of activities to be done before you can be ready for link building.

The most important aspect in Drupal SEO is to select appropriate names for pages/categories and any such other elements.

Next comes the Drupal meta tag optimization which involves various modules to be installed and fine tuning to make them coherent with overall website.

The weakest point of Drupal SEO is content. Most of the time people overlook the actual content of pages which is very important for SEO. Drupal, being a CMS and dynamic, is overlooked for the actual contents. It is very important to keep the content to be optimized for SEO.

SEO for Drupal 7

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Previously vih.dk was a proud #1 in Google search rankings on the keyword "idrætshøjskole", but now we slipped to 4th place. That is not satisfacory, so we had to step up over SEO-game. Recently the site was moved to Drupal 7 from a legacy site, and up until now we just relied on the basic structure of Drupal (which is already really good without enhancement). However, we wanted to get back to number one on the Google search (we are still number one on the search at Bing)!

We focused on:

We focused on some simple elements to improve our position.
  • Good architecture. The urls for the pages are important in the eyes of Google.
  • Good content. We already had some decent content. We needed to improve how the content was marked up. We focused on the page title, meta description and the headings and the emphazised text.
  • Good backlinks. We tried getting former students, blogs and online magazine to write stories about us and to link back to our site to improve our search ranking. That is not the scope for this article.

The chosen modules:

Good architecture was easily achieved using path and pathauto. We just needed to make som sane choises.
Good content was improved by using page_title and metatags_quick. I could not figure out how to override the page title on a pr. node basis, but am still investigating that. In metatags_quick we just enabled the meta description for nodes and taxonomies, and we started entering some data.

Still waiting for extra modules:

Waiting for metatags. We were hoping that metatags had finished development, and I guess we are switching to that module when it is stable as it seems to incorporate the other modules.
Waiting for contentoptimizer. We installed the content optimizer and hoped that it would help our fairly inexperienced editors to provide optimized content. However, it seems that the module is a very early alpha. However, when it works, we will get back with some information about how our staff was able to benefit from the module.

What do you focus on?

What are your focus, when you do SEO and what are your favorite modules the help you achive your goal for Drupal 7?

The result:

Google is still crawling the web. We will get back to you to tell you how the improvements worked for "idrætshøjskole"
 
from:
http://larsolesen.dkhttp://larsolesen.dk/node/330/node/330

dIntroducing Drupal SEO Tools

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Over the last two years we have spent a lot of time working on a series of content-focused Drupal SEO modules. Just before DrupalCon Chicago, we released the final module that integrated the whole system together: Drupal SEO Tools. The module provides a presets system to streamline configuration of vital Drupal SEO modules and a dashboard (screenshot) that integrates charts from Google Analytics with shortcut links to popular SEO functions. 

They system was set up to solve two problems. First, not just knowing which modules to install, which is covered in several good articles and the SEO Checklist, but also to auto-configure the optimal settings for their dozens of options, which can be fairly overwhelming if your are new to Drupal SEO and is rather tedious even for experienced experts. 

The second problem it is trying to solve is to facilitate a workflow for doing SEO in a Drupal site. The SEO Tools module provides a dashboard which provides categories of links to various vital tools for doing search engine optimization. Some are to internal modules and some to external tools such as Google Webmaster Tools. It also integrates Google Analytics data to maximize the transparency of the results of your efforts. In the rush to DrupalCon, we didn't get a chance to formally do a release announcement. Shortly after DrupalCon, one of the required modules, Google Analytics API was abandoned and superseded by another module, Google Analytics Reports. In the crunch of client work we have had to do in the four months since DrupalCon, SEO Tools sat without the required move to use the newer Reports module

 from: 
http://www.leveltendesign.com/blog/tom/introducinghttp://www.leveltendesign.com/blog/tom/introducing-drupal-seo-tools-drupal-seo-tools

 

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