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)

Managing metadata


Metadata is used to describe the contents of a page. In the past, metadata played a key role in helping search engines understand the nature and content of pages, but today it plays a less critical role. Despite its decreasing importance, metadata should never be ignored; it is the one technical feature of pages that is purely intended to help understand and categorize the page content and therefore should always be used to further your SEO goals.

Metadata is added to pages through the use of meta tags, which appear in the head of the HTML document. While the W3C metadata standards provide for a wide range of possible meta tags, you will need to install an extension to fully control the metadata of your Drupal site. Different modules give you different options, but the key tags you will want to implement on your site are shown in the following table:

Drupal label

Meta tag

Notes

Importance

Description

meta name="description"

Should describe the content of the page...