Search engine optimization (“SEO”) ensures that the website can be properly indexed by popular search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Search engine optimization can provide higher levels of website traffic and reduced digital advertising costs with programs such as Google Adwords. For these reasons, search engine optimization can be a key success factor for many projects.

Drupal offers many features for search engine optimization. Features that are often used to improve search engine optimization include:

Pathauto

Drupal automatically generates URL/path aliases for content without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to have path aliases, such as “/category/my-node-title” instead of “/node/123”. The aliases are based upon a "pattern" system that uses tokens which the administrator can change. For more information, see pathauto.

Global Redirect

Drupal creates a clean path alias for each page on a site (for example “content/about-us”). However, Drupal also creates a path using the page identifier (for example, “node/1234”), resulting in multiple paths for the same page. The Global Redirect features ensures only the clean path is enabled; preventing issues related to multiple paths. For more information, see global redirect.

Path Redirect

Drupal allows you to specify a redirect from one path to another path or an external URL, using any HTTP redirect status. If a path changes, or no longer exists, redirecting the original path to another existing path or external URL will prevent visitors from receiving a 404 error. For more information, see redirect.

Metatag

Drupal allows you to automatically provide structured metadata, aka "meta tags", about a website. In the context of search engine optimization, when people refer to meta tags they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag that may help improve the rankings and display of a site in search engine results. For more information, see metatag.

Site Verification

Drupal allows you to verify the site and domain ownership for search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. There are two types of verification methods supported: adding meta tags, or uploading a specific file. For more information, see site verify.

XML Sitemap

Drupal creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This assists search engines to more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date. The sitemap created by the module can be automatically submitted to Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines. For more information, see xml sitemap.

Page Title

Drupal gives you granular 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 more information, see page title.

Menu Attributes

Drupal allows you to specify some additional attributes for menu items such as id, name, class, style, and rel. For more information, see menu attributes.

Google Analytics

Drupal supports popular web analytics platform, Google Analytics. This market leading analytics solutions provide enterprise-class web analytics capabilities including content analytics, in-page analytics, site search reporting, site speed analysis, event tracking, content experiments, mobile analytics, and social analytics. These capabilities make Google Analytics an excellent tool for monitoring search engine optimization results. For more information, see google analytics.

The following pages include detail information regarding a few of these modules, and others.