The Key to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Drupal

 Search Engine Optimization (noun): the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring the site appears high on the list of results displayed by a search engine.

Try this. Go on Google and look up a product or service your company offers. Does your website show up at the top? If it does, you have SEO down pat, but if not, keep reading.

Picture yourself in this scenario. You’re a charity who relies on donations from visitors to your website. You’ve done everything right. You have a great site that’s responsive, looks awesome and has an easy to use donation portal. But, now you’re wondering, “How do I get my website to show up at the top of Google’s organic searches so we get more people looking at our site and making donations”?

Drupal has the answer.

Real-Time SEO

Drupal’s Real-Time SEO module is an extremely useful resource to help you leverage the great content you’ve written for your website. It optimizes content around keywords in a fast and natural way. You don’t have to be an SEO specialist to know strong keywords are crucial to your site’s SEO, and this module tells you if the ones you’ve chosen are being used effectively.

When you’ve integrated the Real-Time SEO module into your site, it seamlessly scans your content and provides you with criteria that you can easily follow to ensure those Google site crawlers gobble up all of your content. Here’s an example of criteria it could produce for your site:

“The text contains 243 words. This is below the 300 words recommended minimum. Add more useful content on this topic for readers.”

You may not realize it, but simple things like the length of your written content can negatively impact your SEO ‘score’. This module catches everything, even the small stuff.

SEO Checklist

Similar to Real-time SEO is Drupal’s SEO Checklist module. Instead of scanning content, the SEO Checklist module looks at your site as a whole and provides you with a list of tasks you should complete improving your Google rankings. It eliminates guesswork and makes it easy to identify the modules or functions your site is missing.

These hassle-free checklists break down SEO-related tasks into functional needs like Title Tags, Paths, Content and many more. Here’s an example of some tasks that might show up in your SEO Checklist:

“Install and enable Coffee Module. Install and Enable Admin Toolbar module.”

The best thing about the SEO Checklist (other than the fact that it increases your site’s SEO) is it keeps track of the tasks you’ve completed by placing a date and time stamp next to each item. This simple tracking acts as a report that you can share with your team or clients.

These are just two of many SEO modules that the Drupal community has developed to ensure your site gets all the attention it deserves. OPIN's developers have used these modules and can attest to their positive impact on a website's Google rankings.

Some advice from a source on the inside:

“If you haven’t thought about your site’s SEO, it’s never too late to start. 89 percent of consumers use search engines (like Google) to inform their purchase decisions. If your site has good SEO, you’ll be at the top of that search and will capture the attention of your audience.”

Images courtesy of Drupal.org.