Drupal SEO Best Practices and Drupal SEO Modules

For technology professional's free products mean low-quality products. You must have heard Drupal which is a free and open-source content management framework system that can be customized to develop a simple website or complex web applications. We also know Drupal grows as you grow to a become a robust, accessible, flexible, multilingual and dependable CMS platform.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered as one the important digital marketing activities for your website. If we simply want to understand what SEO is then it is a list of activities that is carried out on your website and on the internet to improve visibility over the search engine results page (SERP). Not to forget, you may not like SEO, but you cannot ignore.

After speaking to an expert SEO services company or a professional, you will understand the dynamic ever changing behavior of the organic results due to regular search engine algorithm updates and ranking criteria. Considering the regular algorithmic updates in 2023 and 2024 by the search engines, it become utmost necessary to understand SEO best practices.

Focusing on Drupal and Drupal SEO the purpose of the blog remains closely aligned to discoverability of your website to the visitors and search engine crawlers. Let us understand some Drupal SEO best practices and it's SEO Modules.

How was Google Search Updates in 2023 and 2024

Total of 10 updates in 2023 and 5 updates in 2024 was completed. One of the important incidents reported on 15th August 2024 is a work in progress incident and still under speculation with multiple instances of SERP volatility and continuous adjustments.

Is Drupal CMS better for SEO?

If your website is on Drupal or if you are planning to migrate your website to Drupal CMS, then you should know more about similar content management system (CMS). The most popular CMS is WordPress. Drupal CMS is used by 6.29% of the top 10,000 websites and it is ranked 3rd most popular in India in Open-Source Category

Let me surprise you by sharing some of the most famous websites from India that uses Drupal CMS. Why? Drupal is considered for large enterprises to do a heavy lifting of large amounts of data. nodes, traffic and experience place holders easily.

From top companies from the category BFSI, News Portal, Educational Institutes like the IITs, JNU and eCourts use Drupal CMS. This above list should give you enough confidence to select Drupal CMS for your enterprise.

Drupal SEO Best Practices

Before you jump to Drupal, lay your foundation for core SEO requirements or must-have configuration that will help to boost your website's SEO and allow to drive more traffic. Below is list of Drupal SEO Services Checklist to keep ready:

• Have a brainstorming session with your team members and company stakeholders to understand the website goals and objectives with a minimum of period of 2 years. Like key business areas and website objectives.
• Create an ideal customer profile (ICP) and know your audience before creating a Drupal SEO Strategy
• Pivot keywords with short-term, mid-term, long-term and always-on keyword research and analysis to get your keyword strategy align with business goals. This will help you create targeted content suitable for the ICP and audience. Keyword funnel with interaction content journey will be really useful for SEO strategy.
• Work with Drupal web development team to get best output from Technical SEO - Site architecture, UX, Content Delivery Network (CDN), Dynamic Front End, Hosting and Clean Code.
• Work with content development team to create Content Strategy - Intent SEO Content - along with On-Page SEO elements.
• While you get the Website Structure created, devise a healthy internal linking strategies and Off-Page SEO plan for your website.
• Though Google support mobile-first approach, open graph (OG), social media friendly, clean code and responsive websites - get the navigation and accessibility score high irrespective of the device.
• Get your local SEO strategy ready if you are managing multiple stores or branches of any brand. This will be very useful even for enterprise SEO.
• Core Web Vitals Optimization is necessary for website performance and site-speed score on desktop and mobile devices that contributes to search engine rankings.
• Setting up third-party crawlers' access, SEO Analytics and Webmasters Setup will help you to gauge you daily, weekly and monthly performance.
• Always remember, SEO works differently for different businesses and industries. There is no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy for your Drupal website and for on-going SEO Performance.

Remember, websites are just one piece of the Digital Experience Puzzle

Website maintenance is the crucial part of SEO Maintenance for bug fixing, request implementation, step-by-step activity planning for SEO delivery.

Drupal SEO Modules

If any SEO professional or technology professional or a web development team tells you that after installing these modules will solve all your SEO issues, then I recommend staying away from that person till he or she changes the advice.

There are 35,125 modules _{^{(as on 19th October 2024)}} for you to choose from to enable search engine friendly solution for your Drupal Website. There are close to 453 modules, consider these Drupal SEO Modules as tools for helping you in On-page SEO tasks, some technical SEO and enhance other SEO efforts.

Drupal XML Sitemap Module

An XML sitemap allows the search engine crawlers to index pages of the website. You can also set frequency and priority of the pages. Every website should have an XML sitemap.

You can check below how a version of XML sitemap will look like.

Drupal's Simple XML Sitemap can be generated automatically adhering to the new standards of search engines. You can different an index file of the XML Sitemap and can have sub-files of XML sitemap for your products, news, post, pages, images and more.

As and when the XML sitemap is updated, don't forget to submit it on search engine webmaster console or search console.

Below are some of the recommendations to maintain your XML Sitemap

• Check with all the departments in the company if any new page is created and uploaded on the website. Get that new URLs added in the XML Sitemap
• Don't add Page Not Found URL in the XML Sitemap
• Create different XML Sitemap your Product Pages and Product category pages. Very important for e-commerce SEO.
• Create different XML sitemap for images, videos, blog posts or any resources pages.
• Have the XML Sitemap called by robots.txt
• Always host XML Sitemap on <root> folder of the website.
• Update your XML sitemap regularly for timely update of the search engine feedback on crawled or index pages.

Drupal Metatag Module

An Expert SEO understands how important the metatags are to provide structured metadata about the website. Drupal Metatag module allows you to create, add and modify basic meta-tags, referrer policies, open graphs, twitter cards and more.

Below are some of the recommendations to maintain your meta-tags

• Do not assume the Page Title and SEO Title will be the same. Double check the configuration and get it corrected by the Drupal web development team.
• Check for duplicate title tag, description tags and more.
• Ask for SEO elements like
  • Schema Tag
  • Canonical URL
  • View Port
  • Title
  • Description
  • Keywords
  • Mobile Web App Capable
  • More.

SEO Walk-the-Talk _{(Final thoughts)}

Using right Drupal SEO modules, you can improve on-page activity and task to support your website to be incompliance to search engine ranking criteria. As said earlier no one-size-fit-all, make sure you use only expert SEO techniques. Always keep a check on Google algorithms update and its effect on your website SEO ranking, traffic and revenue in case of e-commerce SEO. Stay grounded and don't expect immediate results for all the effort you do for SEO - Stick to your basics.

You need an expert Drupal SEO services company who can help you to maneuver your brand SEO results and support you with tech, content, marketing, analytics, CRO and conversions.