Drupal and SEO

Drupal is one of the foremost content management systems (CMS) available for use. Whether you are running a business or a personal content website, Drupal comes with many innate SEO capabilities, and Drupal 7 comes with even more SEO capabilities. If you want to dominate the search engines, then getting a Drupal CMS website is the ultimate choice. There are many Drupal SEO modules that can further optimize Drupal for search engines, but this just represents Drupal’s out-of-the-box effectiveness.

Most CMSs only allow you to control a portion of the URL. For example, WordPress only allows you to change the end of the URL. Drupal, on the other hand, enables you to fully customize the URL. If you optimize the address for your keywords, you can make a URL that the search engines will have a hard time ignoring. Not only that, but since most search engine’s use this as a factor when sorting websites by relevance, it makes Drupal a very powerful SEO machine. Another way Drupal 7 is great for SEO is its ability to make custom content types through the CCK, or content construction kit. Normally if you want to make a post into a blog post, news story, tutorial or so on, you need to add extra code to ensure the post is readily optimized. However, Drupal’s CCK enables you to just select the content type and the programming is done for you. Even if you know the programming, this can save you hours of time on average. Page titles are normally easy to make with regular HTML, but Drupal 7 goes a step further by making and organizing page titles for SEO purposes. It will extract important keywords from your post and it will be turned into a title. However, just in case Drupal gets the wrong keywords or organize the title incorrectly, you are still in full control. You can easily change the title by filling out a little text form. Google Analytics can be difficult to properly configure, although it is incredibly important for SEO. Drupal 7 makes it very easy by giving you simple fields to fill out and work with to make Google Analytics works exactly how you want it. For example, you can tell Google Analytics to not follow your views, which often skew traffic results. Not only that, but since Drupal integrates so well with Analytics, it will increase load times, which is also useful for SEO. When you make a post with Drupal 7, you are able to easily organize and tag it. This is done by selecting a category and writing in a list of keywords. For one, this will help your visitors easily find your posts when they search through your website. On the other hand, it will also help your SEO efforts by making your website very easy to read by search engine spiders. Drupal 7 comes with a huge load of features, and even more modules, that help boost your SEO efforts. However, the real backbone of SEO isn’t features and modules: it’s good content. Without good content, you cannot get yourself ranked in the search engines, nor can you keep your readers interested in your website. You have to consistently make and post good, well-written content, otherwise your website is doomed to fall below your competitors.