Barton Consulting

Here are some basic Drupal SEO tips that will go along way towards helping improve your Drupal Websites rankings.

1. Enable Clean URLs:   Go to administer -> settings -> Clean URLs and enable them.  If for some reason you cannot change the setting.  It means that your server needs the Apache mod_rewrite module, or your .htaccess file needs to be updated.  Usually you just need to uncomment the “RewriteBase /” line in your .htaccess file.
   
2. Enable Pathauto, Global Redirect and Token Modules:
   The pathauto module makes it possible to automatically generate Search Engine friendly URLs.  The Global Redirect module makes it so requests are always redirected to the pathauto generated URL alias.  This is important to avoid duplicate content.  The token module, helps in generating search engine friendly urls.   One trick to using Pathauto, is you want to update the pathauto settings so that if you change your page title, it doesn’t change the auto generated url.  This is the “Update Action” setting.  It should be set to “Do Nothing. Leave the old alias intact.”
3. Install the Page Title Module:
     This will make it so you can have a page title that is different than your article titles.  It also makes it so you can create keyword rich titles which will dramatically help improve your search engine rankings.
4. Install the Nodewords Module:
   This will allow you to add meta keywords, and meta description tags to your sites articles.
5. Redirect subdomains properly in your .htaccess file: This step is to help avoid duplicate content.  If your domain name is example.com, and you want people to go to www.example.com to visit your website.  Then 301 redirect example.com to www.example.com.
   
6. Edit your robots.txt file: Make sure that your site is open to the search engines.  Use your robots.txt as needed to prevent access to duplicate content.  Do your RSS feeds need to be blocked? Any other pages that are potentially duplicate content? Archives, etc.
7. Install the XML Sitemap Module:
   Install the XML Sitemap module and submit it to Google Webmaster tools

There you have it. Follow these SEO tips on your Drupal web site for Drupal SEO bliss.

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