"There can be only one!" —The Highlander
"If you are not first in Google then your competition certainly is." —Ben Finklea
At its heart, Drupal is a way for people to build great web sites in a short period of time. It's packaged up with some compelling features like user logins, RSS, version control, an advanced theme layer, and solid core code. There are bundled releases (Acquia Drupal and Open Atrium) that take Drupal further, faster. There are great theme web sites (www.topnotchthemes.com) that make your site look just like you want it to. There are terrific training videos (www.lullabot.com), and hundreds of forums where you can find answers to any question you might have. But, Drupal is not perfect.
Despite its advantages, many Drupal web sites suffer with poor search engine rankings. The thing that makes Drupal so powerful—its flexibility—also means that it takes some work to get it configured just the right way for the search engines.
That's where Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization comes in.
With this book and basic Drupal 6 knowledge, that is, how to log in, create content, and install modules—you can build a perfectly optimized web site. Each chapter uses easy, step-by-step instructions to walk you through the Drupal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) modules, configurations, and content you will need. Advanced topics include things like site organization, A/B testing, and automatic content tagging to maximize SEO. If you want a significant advantage over competitors who are not using Drupal, and to maximize the return on investment of your Drupal 6 web site, then this is the book for you.
Chapter 1, The Tools That You'll Need, covers all the tools you're going to need for Drupal SEO. From Drupal and all the great modules available for SEO to setting up a Google account, this chapter is foundational to the rest of this book.
Chapter 2, Keyword Research, explains all the tools you're going to need to do keyword research, from Drupal stats in your own web site to all the great tools available online. Keyword research is one of the most important things you'll do in SEO, so make sure you've taken the time to do it right.
Chapter 3, On-Page Optimization, explores the most important aspects of on-page SEO for your Drupal site, which are Page Titles and Paths.
Chapter 4, More On-Page Optimization, covers more of the all-important aspects of on-page SEO for your Drupal site.
Chapter 5, Sitemaps, discusses the origin of sitemaps and how they're used to make sure your entire site is crawled by the search engines. It also teaches you how to make a user-friendly sitemap for your site visitors.
Chapter 6, robots.txt, .htaccess, and W3C Validation, teaches you some of the most technical aspects of a good SEO.
Chapter 7, RSS Feeds, Site Speed, and SEO Testing, helps you get your web site Search Engine Optimized. It teaches you about RSS Feeds, PageRank, Drupal's built-in caching, and checking your site with SEOmoz.
Chapter 8, Content is King, teaches you how to get good content and search engine optimize it. It also teaches you how to maintain the content and keep it search engine-optimized.
Chapter 9, Taking Control of Your Content, teaches how to maintain your content and gain control over it. It also teaches how to keep your content compliant and free from spam with the use of various modules.
Chapter 10, Increasing the Conversion Rate of Your Drupal Web site, explores the three main types of web sites and their conversion goals. It also covers the Usability and A/B testing techniques.
Appendix A explains how to avoid ten common SEO mistakes.
Appendix B provides you with the Drupal SEO Checklist.
Appendix C covers the Drupal SEO case study for the Acquia product launch.
A basic understanding of Drupal will be helpful—what a node is, how to create nodes, how to log in to the admin sections of your Drupal site, and how to properly install and enable a module. No knowledge of SEO will be assumed, but a basic knowledge of search engines is expected.
Maybe you're a web site owner who wants to get more leads and sales from his web site. Maybe you're a Drupal web developer and your customers are asking you how to increase the return on investment of their web site. Or perhaps you're a non-profit, that is looking for more donations and volunteers. Maybe you're someone else entirely, there are almost as many good reasons to rank well in Google as there are web sites.
No matter your reason, you hold in your hands the knowledge that you need to rank at the top of the search engines, and turn visitors into paying customers for your business. Each page of this book tells you exactly what you'll need to do, to properly search engine optimize your web site. If you're relatively new to Drupal, just follow the easy, step-by-step instructions and screenshots. If you're an old hand, skip past the basic steps and review the best configuration options for each module. I've boiled down years of experience in Drupal, online marketing, monetization, dozens of modules, some tips, and a few tricks into a powerful potion of Drupal SEO goodness.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Let's take a deeper look at each directive used in the Drupal robots.txt file".
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: " I added the site logo file into the Test URLs box".
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