This little bugger is addictive! SEO Watcher is a module that allows you to check the ranking of your (and your competitors) site with major search engines. Ranking reports can be sent out daily, weekly or monthly, but our bet is you’ll be checking this every day. SEO Watcher allows you to specify up to 10 keywords or phrases to track. Additionally, you may compare your results with up to five competing sites.
The Content Optimizer module helps increase your Drupal site’s search engine rankings by improving on-page optimization factors. It provides instant analysis of site content and displays vital content statistics and recommendations for improving search engine rankings. The analysis tool calculates content statistics for each vital page section, including character count, word count, keyword count, keyword density and keyword prominence. Search engine optimization recommendations are generated by comparing content statistics with SEO guidelines and best practices.
Once you’ve installed the Content Optimizer Module, you should head out and pick up the Keyword Research module. This module provides intelligence to help you explore, analyze and select better keyword phrases for your content directly from your website.
The module provides reports on a keyword phrase's popularity and the popularity of suggested related phrases using various data sources. The Keyword Research module then reports your keyword data findings with a pop-up actions menu that enables one-click popularity reports and allows you to add or remove keywords in your taxonomies and Meta tags.
Put simply, Global Redirect keeps your site from having two URL’s which point to the same content. Drupal has a built-in feature called "URL Alias" that allows you to provide a more readable (and thus search engine friendly) URL address for your web pages. Once enabled, an alias provides a nice, clean URL for a path on a site; however, Drupal does not remove the old path. What happens here is that search engines and users now see two unique pages for the same piece of content. Search engines tend to penalize you for this duplicate content.
What Global Redirect does is set up 301 redirects from the old address to the new address. What that means is that Global Redirect makes sure that for each piece of content you have, there is one URL and one URL only. This is an absolute must-have module if you're using aliases!
6. XML Sitemap
This module does exactly what you might think it does. It creates an XML Sitemap for your website. An XML sitemap helps crawlers know what content you have on your website, and allows them to index pages on your website. The best feature of the XML Sitemap module for Drupal is that you can control what gets added to the sitemap. It isn't necessarily a good strategy to include every page of your site in an XML sitemap. If your site targets specific keywords, listing all of your content pages in the XML sitemap -- even those with few of your keywords -- can draw focus away from your keyword-rich content.
Luckily, the XML Sitemap module allows you to pick and choose what pages of your site the search engines index. Once you’ve installed the module and created your XML sitemap it can automatically be submitted to Ask, Google, Bing and Yahoo! search engines.
5. Meta Tags
Do meta tags matter anymore? Well, that depends on who you ask. If you ask Google the response will be “I can’t tell you.” It is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to including meta data on your sites pages, especially when it comes to meta descriptions and meta keywords. A meta description tag is a brief and concise summary of your page's content. A meta keyword tag is a summary list of the most important words on your page
The Meta Tags module is the successor to Nodewords in Drupal 6, and is designed to be the ultimate meta tags module for Drupal 7. The Meta Tags module allows you to easily add and change meta tags to your pages, potentially improving your search engine rankings. This module also allows you to add page titles, which are also discussed below.
4. Page Title
Should you forgo the above option of installing the Meta Tags module you should, at very least, install the Page Title module. A page title is the language found in the HTML head inside the
The Page Title module gives you control over the page title. You can specify patterns for how the title should be structured and, on content creation pages, specify the page title separately to the content's title. For example your sites “About Us” page may be titled “My Company | About My Company”.
3. Pathauto
Remember those aliases we spoke about in number seven of our countdown? The Pathauto module automatically generates aliases for your sites content pages without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to have URL aliases like/category/my-node-title instead of /node/123. This makes your URL’s clean and readable to users and search engines.
With the help of Pathauto, the aliases for your pages are based upon a "pattern" system that uses “tokens” which the administrator can change. This means you do not have to define an alias URL for each page of content, but can instead create a system of naming your aliases and have them automatically generated.
Google Analytics shows you where your site’s traffic is coming from, how visitor’s interact with your site, and how you can enhance visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your websites return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.
The Google Analytics module adds Google's advanced statistics software to your website. Google Analytics features includes single/multi/cross domain tracking, AdSense support, tracking of goals, and much more.
SEO Checklist is our number one, must-have, get-it-now, module for Drupal SEO. This module creates a to-do list of the tasks and modules that you should be adding to your Drupal core to keep your site optimized for search engines. As you move through the list of suggested actions, SEO Checklist places a date and time stamp next to each task once they are completed.
This module will not only allow you to keep track of what you have completed so far, but will also introduce you to some of the best Drupal SEO practices. Updated regularly with the latest techniques, this module makes on-page Drupal search engine optimization hassle-free. Go get it!
And there you have it- our top 10 SEO Drupal modules. As always, the Drupal Developers at Drupal Geeks are available to assist you in managing your Drupal SEO or Drupal Module Development. If you need us to need help with your website or want to maximize your web presence, give us a call!