I've been playing with SEO optimization on my Drupal site (www.kidpub.com) since about August of last year, mainly tweaking meta tags (description) and title tags. I use Nodewords and Pathauto for high-level optimization.
KidPub is a site for kids who enjoy writing. It was launched in 1995 with custom code on the CGI framework, then migrated to PHP in 2000, and to Drupal in about 2005. We give kids a place to post their stories, poetry, reviews, and other creative writing; host writing contests with great prizes, and in general give kids a fun, safe place to hone their writing skills and build confidence. We also publish books written by children. I am one of only a handful of individuals who have run the same website continuously for 15 years, and I think it gives me some interesting perspective.
Traffic to KidPub in its Drupal incarnation averaged 3,000 to 4,000 unique visitors per month through August of 2008, when I began to look for ways to increase traffic to the site. About 65% of our traffic is generated from Google searches, 20% direct, with the remainder from Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. It wasn't hard to decide to go after better Google placement. The goal was to double traffic by improving placement in the search engines in our target keywords.
The results are available graphically at my blog, http://kidpub.blogspot.com. In the period from August 2008 to December 2008, traffic has improved from 4,000 unique visitors per month to about 9,000 unique visitors, and KidPub.com is now the #1 search result on Google for 5 of our 10 target keywords ('kids publishing', 'kids stories', 'kids writing', 'publish my story', and 'kids publisher'). We are continuing to optimize to imrove the placement of our other 5 keywords.
Optimization was done in several steps. First, we used Pathauto to produce better search results by showing the Google spiders human-readable filenames based on the story title. A side effect of this is excellent placement on keywords that we hadn't thought of, such as 'new twilight book' (#3) and 'magazines that publish kids stories' (#4).
Next, we used Nodewords (Meta Tags) to set global keywords in meta tags for all pages returned at KidPub (currently about 14,000 indexed by Google). The keywords included our ten target words and phrases.
The title tag was modified using the page_title module to output a ten-word phrase that describes our site. Heat maps (graphical representations of what a user looks at) of Google searches show that users spend most of their short time on the Google page in the upper left, specifically on the links for the top three results. The link come from the title tag. It's your ten-word marketing opportunity, and it needs to tell the reader exactly what your site is. Our title tag emits 'Publisher of books and stories for kids, by kids'. You can see a heat map and an explanation of using the title tag as a marketing tool on my blog (http://kidpub.blogspot.com).
The description meta tag is configured to emit about twenty words that act as the call to action. It is typically displayed beneath the link on Google. We want the title to tell the reader in a few words what the site is, and then give them a reason to come to the site with the description.
These are the only changes made to the site during the measurement period from August to December of 2008. Granted there are external factors (word of mouth, appearance in a blog etc) that bring traffic to a site, but I'm convinced that the optimization effort is primarily what led to a doubling of traffic. We are projecting another doubling in the next three months to 20,000 unique visitors per month based on the current rate of growth.
I am currently blogging quite a bit on SEO, mainly because it's on my mind and I want to learn by sharing what I've observed. The blog is at http://kidpub.blogspot.com, and KidPub is at www.kidpub.com. I invite everyone to visit both and have a discussion on better ways to optimize Drupal.
Perry
Comments
Wow
Doubling the visitors is really great. Of course, you've got the content to back up that SEO. I'm still working on the adding content part so doing more with SEO likely won't help me much at this stage.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Content helps
It definitely helps that KidPub has about ten years of content online and searchable, and our members create hundreds of pages each month of fresh content. I still think that the SEO work has contributed to the placement of not only our core keywords, but those are only part of the story.
For example, when I take a look at the search phrases that bring traffic to the site, 'kidpub' and 'kidpub.com' are number 1 and 2, as you might expect (and they are each about 95% existing users), but numbers 3 and 4 are 'new twilight book' and 'great insults'. I think it's important to understand your traffic sources and take action on trends. For example, when someone does a Google search for 'new twilight book', the first result returned is stephaniemeyers.com (she wrote the series). But the SECOND result returned is a link to a review of the book by a KidPub member. Amazon.com and MTV.com are farther down the list.
My goal on these pages is to reduce the bounce rate (readers who look at the page and leave the site). The bounce on both pages is high, in the upper 80% range. Reducing that to 60% means more eyes on the site and potentially a better conversion rate.
Perry
KidPub: For Kids Who Love to Write
Building a Successful Website: Lessons Learned at KidPub
Update: Sky template helps, too
An update to my original post about SEO work at KidPub. About a month ago we migrated templates from Aurora to Sky. Sky is more search-engine friendly than Aurora, especially in the way it uses H1 and H2 tags, and in the way it orders the rendered page.
The improvement is significant. You can see the updated search-engine positions for our key phrases on my blog. I originally chose Sky because I wanted to clean up my site's navigation with drop-down menus, and move to a two-column layout to open up the page a bit. It's a great template, easy to modify and easy to understand. The positive SEO results were a nice little present!
Perry Donham
KidPub Press
www.kidpub.com