Guide to Profitable Sales
Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)
Using Drupal is like any other website tool. Your website’s success can depend a lot on the traffic it receives. Sure, there are sites where visitors are arriving simply because it is listed on your business card, in a mailer, via a landing page link, etc. However, these days search engines play a big role in traffic to most sites. Unlike in the past, simply hiding a bunch of terms in the pages via a font color the same as the background color won’t get you a high score. You will recieve dividends for unique, original content. You will recieve bonus points for other sites linking to yours; so you might do some business development contacts to strike deals with logically related referring websites. There are also modules that Drupal has available which aid SEO performance.
Metatag Module
The Metatag module is still a valuable tool to make sure searching finds the most important and relevant connections to your website. No need to hide them; they are part of the metadata for your site that you will see if you ‘inspect content’ with your browsers’s developer view of a page. This video on installing and configuring the Metatag module will help you get the most out of it. The control provided gives you access to global, page specific, even user related detail with an inheritance logic. The fact that it also uses the Token Module brings the power of even tapping the variables present through out your website as metatags. The module even goes further in providing flow control to share specfic content with social media sites.
You can also use the Metatag module for a “No Index” directive to search engines. Why would you want to not have a page indexed? Some stuff you want to just keep private. Some stuff may be a duplicate and you don’t want to get penalized in your search rank. Some stuff is just things like a terms and conditions or privacy page that is meant to be seen after you come to the site but not out there in a search result.
Real-time SEO Module
The Real-time SEO for Drupal module works with the Metatag module and gives you a clear understanding of how your site/pages are going to list on a search result. Here is how you install it and configure it. The module also provides a sort of audit of suggestions for improving your SEO results; with real specific directive value to content editors to improve their contributions.
Simple XML Sitemap Module
Search engines “crawl” websites to create their indexing magic. They need to know what to crawl. So people create a sitemap to tell them. The Simple XML Sitemap Module is how you will do this for your site and create the XML formated map needed. If you want to understand more about how site maps work, check out “What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one?” Her is Guidance on exactly how to set up this module.
XML Sitemap via on-line tool
It is also possible to use various tools to generate a sitemap. A search will find many. One that is super simple to use is here. It will generate the map file and you need to take that an put it into a root location for your site. Even if you ultimately find it easier to use one of the Drupal specific modules noted above, you might want to run this on-line tool on your intially running site for the simply output report; very likely you will find several lines here and there in the report where it reports an error because you have a broken link. The context of the nearby lines in the report will help make it easier to find that broken link and repair it before your sitemap finalization.