SEO

There are two types of Search Engine Optimization(SEO):

1) Off Page - links on other sites to your site, which increase page rank

2) On Page - things you do to your pages to increase page rank.

Most of the discussion herein is limited to On Page optimizations you can make to your Drupal site.

An alternative way to drive traffic is through the purchase of web advertising, e.g. Google Adwords, the small text ads that you see on the top and side of Google search results, and other on affiliate sites. Most ads in Google search results are placed on the right, with the larger top ads reserved for advertisers that have the best combination of CPC (Cost per Click) and click-through rate.

Web advertising is a good compliment to SEO - using the two together will help drive a decent volume of traffic to your site. An important point to consider is that static pages gradually lose position in the rankings, so be sure to update your site occasional, even if making only minor updates.

Analysis

Use the Google Analytics Module to analyze your sites traffic.

HEAD Section Tags

In the section be sure to define unique </code> and <code><META name=description></code> tags that reflect the content of the page. The <code><META name=keywords></code> tag is ignored by most search engines, so in most cases there is no need to define keywords. Here is an example of a <code><HEAD></code> section (keywords included to show syntax): <code> <HEAD> <TITLE>The Benefits of Kata

META Tags

Install the Meta Tags Module (AKA Nodewords) in order to update the META description and keywords tags. The description META tag helps give crawlers an idea of what the page is about, but it is not the description used by most search engines (including Google) for describing the page in search results listings. It is important to create unique description META tags to improve the page rank of your pages. The keywords META tag is supported by very few search engines (and not supported by Google), so it makes sense, in most cases, to not bother with entering keywords META data. The robots META tag is used to tell robots not to index a page: . No tag is necessary to get crawlers to index a page - by default they index any page they can find. Note that the robots.txt method of preventing a page from being indexed is more efficient, as you don't need to add a tag to every page. Although the header is the logical place to include keywords, it is also important to include them in your page content. Even search engines that don't place more weight on keywords in the header use keyword frequency in calculating a page's overall score. Sprinkle keywords, and their synonyms, liberally throughout the page content and inside HTML code.

TITLE Tags

Text placed in the title tag appears in the top bar of the browser. The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists. The text used in the title tag is one of the most important factors in determining search engine ranking of a web page. In addition, all major search engines use the text of the title tag as the text used to display page titles in search result listings.

HTML Validation

Crawlers like valid markup. Validate your site at http://validator.w3.org. Check your links at http://validator.w3.org/checklink. Also, Install the HTML Purifier Module, it will make sure that HTML entered as content is well formed (and also free of malicious code).

Page URLs

Use "static pages" for each of your pages. The PathAuto Module automatically generates static path names for your pages. If you are manually creating a page URL, it is best to put dashes in between each word, to help the search engine know the individual word that make up the URL. Typically, all lower case is used. For example: www.example.com/latex-home-interior-paint.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is an XML file that provides a list of all links available on a site. It was originally invented by Google in 2005, and so is often referred to as a "Google Sitemap". It is especially useful for sites that have dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries, has a large archive of content that isn't available directly through navigation, or has pages that are launched using Flash. The sitemap indicates to crawlers how such pages can be found. Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask all support the Sitemaps protocol. The sitemap is an XML file located at /sitemap.xml. XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" whereby a form is filled out on the search engine's submission page. Instead, the it is now possible to submit the sitemap directly.

Submit Your Site

Submit your site to (at least) the following search engines:

robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to prevent search engine crawlers from indexing pages you don't want indexed. Drupal comes with a default robots.txt that is fairly complete, except that, if you are using pathauto, you may want to add the line: Disallow: /node/. This is done to prevent crawlers from indexing duplicate content, that is, the www.example.com/node/999 and the www.example.com/pathauto-named version of the page are duplicates, and this may reduce page's score and/or waste site bandwidth with crawlers indexing each page twice.