You should know this by now but if you don’t know, Drupal is one of the most (if not the most) SEO friendly content management systems around. Since I began my journey with Drupal about one year ago, I have come across a handful of modules that have made life so much easier when it comes to optimizing my sites for search engine rankings. Some I have stuck with and others I've tossed aside. I am going to post a series of short posts, reviewing my favorite and, in my opinion, the top seven Drupal SEO modules that you must have on all of your sites. I'll be ranking them by importance (again, in my opinion), starting with #7. Drum roll please…
#7 – SEO Friend
URL: http://drupal.org/project/seo_friend
Admin: /admin/reports/seo_friend
The SEO Friend module for Drupal is basically a module built to help you start optimizing your site for search engine rankings. It provides a checklist of recommended modules with priorities, links, and descriptions attached. If you have a module installed, it checks it off the list and if you don’t it tells you why you need it. There are a lot of modules in this list that I don’t use, and quite frankly haven’t even had time or the desire to test out, but feel free to read down the list and pick and choose what you feel is important for your specific site. Be careful though, too many modules can slow down your site!
Along with a checklist, SEO Friend provides several reports that take an in-depth look at some important SEO elements: meta data, page titles, and pathauto (you will see these three modules again, soon). These reports primarily show content and pages that you are either missing data for or have duplicate content on. Duplicate content is a big strike when it comes to onsite SEO, and this module let’s you identify and fix the problem on every one of your pages in a matter of a few short minutes.
The last helpful feature, and why I think it's one of the best Drupal modules for SEO out there, that SEO Friend gives to us is a tab on each one of your pages with SEO specific data. It’s a quick overview of the data you are displaying and missing for that particular page so you know what you have set correctly and what you need to touch up.
Overall, the SEO Friend module is small, straight to the point and a very helpful module to get you started in the right direction for your onsite SEO optimization. So install it already!
There is a similar(ish) module called SEO Checklist, which has a more detailed list of suggestions for you to implement on your site. But there aren’t any reports, and a lot of the items on the checklist are not actually all that helpful for increasing your site's SEO awesomeness; so I left it off the list. Do you agree?
Just so I don’t keep anyone hanging, or those of you who need the information now rather than later, I’ll go ahead and provide the remaining 6 modules that I think you need to have on your site. I’ll provide a little bit more on each with specific posts over the new several days, but here's the list:
7 – SEO Friend
6 – Nodewords
5 – Path Redirect
4 – XML Sitemap
3 – Page Title
2 – Global Redirect
1 – Pathauto
Have you had any experience with any of these modules or think that I’ve forgotten a crucial module that you want everyone else to know about? What's your opinion on the best drupal modules for SEO? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments
Not a module per se
http://kaioa.com/node/78 page speed very useful for SEO these days.