Book Image

Drupal Search Engine Optimization

By : Ric Shreves
Book Image

Drupal Search Engine Optimization

By: Ric Shreves

Overview of this book

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process and techniques by which you optmize the content and style of your site in order to induce more people to view it. Drupal SEO will help you develop and execute an effective search engine optimization strategy for your site. From planning to implementation, the book covers best practices in contemporary SEO. In Drupal SEO you will learn how to develop a dynamic and productive SEO campaign. Covering both the basics of campaign development as well as the daily work it takes to maintain your SEO competitiveness, this book will show you how to produce a distinct and appropriate strategy for your site. In particular you will learn key phrase selection and competitor analysis and the correct groundwork for your dynamic SEO campaign. Drupal SEO will then show you, by finding the right combination of extensions, how to supercharge your site. You will also be given a guided tour of key SEO services, like Google and Bing Webmaster, in order to implement a progressive and effective link building campaign. You will then learn key expert tips and tricks to enable you to build SEO-effective content which will take your site from invisible to unmissable with little effort.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Setting up search engine friendly URLs


We now go from one of the most basic tasks to one of the most important—setting up search engine friendly (SEF ) URLs. Let's start the discussion by setting a clear definition of what it means for a site to have search engine friendly URLs.

Sites created with content management systems such as Drupal, rely on interaction with the database for the display of content. Accordingly, the URLs often include query strings and other characters that are needed to extract that data from the database. (In contrast, a simple HTML site doesn't have this issue; as a result, its URLs are typically much simpler and lack the complexity seen in CMS-powered websites).

URLs containing query strings and other odd characters are hard for both humans and search engines to read. Ideal URLs are readable and tell us something about the content of the page. By default, the Drupal system produces complex URLs containing additional characters that serve no useful purpose for the...