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)

What is SEO?


At its most basic, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. More importantly, for the purposes of the philosophy espoused in this text, SEO is a process—a series of planning and execution steps that lead to a website being optimized to perform its best on the search engines.

Notice the emphasis on process—SEO is not something you do once and then forget about. While an intensive period of attention to your site's optimization factors can lay a solid foundation and get you off to a proper start, if you do not continue to make efforts to improve and respond to market conditions, your rankings will stagnate and then erode over time. Moreover, your efforts do not exist in isolation; there are others out there competing for rankings and traffic. In order to succeed, you need to do your best to stay ahead of the others fighting for ranking for their sites.

Note

When we talk about the search engines in this text, we mean Google, Bing, Baidu, or other similar sites focused on allowing the general public to search for and find information on the Web. Typically, what works for one search engine will work for others. Though there are peculiarities and optimization strategies that can be applied to target-specific engines, most SEO techniques are search-engine agnostic.

The competition for attention online should never be underestimated. If you are in a competitive business vertical—be it travel, finance, gambling, web design, property, or others—the battle for traffic from the search engines is cutthroat. Never forget that the major players out there have dedicated SEO teams that do nothing every day but tweak, optimize, build links, create content, and generally do their best to out-compete all other similar business vying for the top spots on the search engines.

In this book, we put forward a methodology for search engine optimization. The process we advocate can be viewed broadly as having two parts—foundations and on-going efforts. We start by looking at how to lay a great foundation for your site, that is, the basics of creating a search engine friendly site. In later chapters, we turn our attention to on-going techniques for maintaining and improving your rankings over time. Along the way, we look at how to formulate and implement a coherent search engine strategy.

Note

Never forget, for most site owners the actual goal is traffic generation, not pure search engine ranking.

While many of the issues in SEO relate to technical aspects of the site, there is much more to SEO than just getting the technical aspects of your Joomla! site in order. One of the fundamental principles advocated in this book is to focus on the creation of useful, unique content. There is a strong, positive correlation between high quality content and high site ranking. This is one of the few areas where the search engines provide specific guidance about what they are looking for in a site. On the subject of quality, Google provides the following guidance:

  • Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking".

  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Bing also emphasizes the importance of content and advises as follows:

  • Ensure content is built based on keyword research to match content to what users are searching for

  • Produce deep, content-rich pages; be an authority for users by producing excellent content

  • Set a schedule and produce new content frequently

  • Be sure content is unique—don't reuse content from other sources

Note

Don't try to outsmart Google—it's not going to work. Even if you find a way to artificially manipulate your rankings, there will come a day—very soon—when Google will pick up on it and make adjustments to their algorithms. When that happens, your site rankings will plummet and you will go from hero to zero.

While content is critical, it should not be your only concern. SEO practitioners often disagree about the relative importance of various factors in site rankings, but there is general agreement on which factors play a part. The search engine business is very competitive and companies such as Google and Bing do not disclose details of how their algorithms work. Fortunately for us, there is a considerable body of third-party research focused on discerning trends and patterns in search engine ranking. One of the best sources of information on this topic is SeoMoz's Search Ranking Factors, a report they publish free of charge and update annually. The data in the report comes from interviews of more than 130 SEO specialists and from a large data set that seeks to identify correlations between site variables and search engine rank.

Note

View the report online by visiting http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.

Among the factors that are agreed to be significant are:

  • Keywords in the domain name

  • Keywords in a page's URL

  • Keywords in the content title

  • Keyword placement on page

  • Keyword repetition on page

  • Uniqueness of content

  • Freshness of content

  • Facebook activity

  • Twitter activity, including influence of account tweeting

  • Google+ activity

  • Social media up votes and comments

  • Click through rate for the site

  • Bounce rate for the site

  • Number, quality, and content of links to this site

  • Number of internal links

  • Number of errors on site

  • Speed of the site

In sum, SEO is a process that requires a multifaceted strategy. At a minimum, you need to make an effort to create a site that is search engine friendly, but in order for your site to excel in the rankings, you must do more. SEO requires concerted effort across time and you must also focus on the creation of unique, quality content.

Note

The future of SEO

SEO is a moving target. The search engines are constantly adjusting their algorithms and practitioners are constantly trying new strategies and modifying their approach. While it is impossible to predict with any accuracy what the future of SEO will bring, there is some consensus among experts about which direction it is moving in. Generally speaking, we believe the future will see a continued emphasis on determining the perceived value of each site. This will be done by looking at not only the quality of the site's content, but also social media signals and site traffic patterns. Site performance will also continue to be a factor, with faster, better built sites being preferred over slow, badly engineered sites.

These factors are consistent with what we know about the general goals the search engines aspire to, that is, to be able to perceive sites more like users perceive them, rather than as a purely mathematical exercise.