6 Tips To Rock Drupal 8 SEO
Drupal works phenomenally for SEO. Using Drupal 8 as your Content Management System gives you a robust set of tools to rock your Search Engine Optimization process. We have seen customers experiencing good organic traffic with well optimized Drupal 8 websites. There are cases where they have tripled their traffic within a few weeks after upgrading to Drupal 8 from other platforms.
Drupal 8 is the most preferred content management system for complex business websites as it is built with flexibility and functionality to better optimize every view, node and code snippet for search engines.
The latest version of Drupal 8 has included easy to use and robust functionalities to enhance your site optimization. Drupal 8 is the best way to create and market your website globally. To make marketing much easy and beneficial here are 6 tricks to make the best of Drupal 8 SEO.
Drupal SEO Checklist
To make marketing of sites easier Drupal published the Drupal SEO Checklist module at Drupal.org. The checklist helps you choose the right module and task to optimize your site. Robert Shea of IBM says that “Drupal SEO Checklist is the most powerful Drupal module that ‘does nothing.’”
The SEO checklist module gives a list of What-to-do. The tasks are categorized based on functionalities such as title tags, content, paths, etc. Links are given to download the module and to land on the admin screen of your website in order to configure the settings based on your business requirement.
Clean And Clear URLs
For effective optimization of your Drupal 8 site, we should ensure that the URLs are clean; the site content is apt, concise and clear; and a good link value is maintained even when the content is modified. In Drupal 8, clean URLs are installed by default. The Redirect Module redirects users from old URLs to new ones by creating 301 redirects. This works the best when contents are moved from one section of your site to another and ensures that the site’s URL ranks the same on Google. In addition to this, the module automates the fixing of broken links, which is considered as a SEO task for webmasters.
Pathauto is another module in Drupal 8 that generates URLs automatically for SEO friendly content, thus reducing the task of creating a single content URL manually on your site.
Application Of Meta Tags
Meta tags play a major role in making Drupal 8 effective . The Meta tag module automatically provides structured meta data and title tags to every website page by placing both meta tag and HTML title tags in the header of the web page. This reduces codes and increases the speed of the website, thereby enhancing your website's SEO.
The Alternate Hreflang module adds hreflang tags to all the pages of the website. Search engines use these tags as a reference to give the search results related to the specific region or language.
Communicate With Search Engines
In order to index your website in the search engines, the search engines provide reports and tools to communicate and analyze your site’s performance. Website marketers use these tools to achieve better search results and increase traffic.
The XML Sitemap Module helps in creating a well formatted XML sitemap of your content that is submitted to the search engines. This provides better SEO by giving the search engine a list of pages that need to be crawled or indexed.
Drupal 8 offers a system called Cron to maintain and clean your website. It checks for updates, indexes the content and rebuilds the XML sitemaps, and thus ensures that the XML sitemap is up to date after the new content is added to your site.
Drupal’s Google Analytics module inserts the Google Analytics code snippet to your site and permits you to control the usage of the tool. Google Analytics tool, being the most widely used tool by content marketers, allows you to keep a check on demographics, site behavior, keywords and much more.The Google Analytics module in Drupal 8 can be used to tackle the common issues associated with Google Analytics such as racking of visitors and including the admin of the site, can be resolved by using the Google Analytics module in Drupal 8 by just snipping the code when a non admin visits the site. This ensures that your site’s data is clean and reports are more reliable.
Download Drupal 8 SEO Modules
Nothing is as powerful as search engines falling in love with your site and boosting the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). The Drupal modules listed above are just a few examples to promote your sites SEO. Drupal 8’s core comprises the Resource Description framework that includes the RDF UI module that allows seamless integration of schema.org while developing the website. Schema.org describes itself as “On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results”.
The Linkit module’s auto complete field gives an easy interface to create links in WYSIWYG content editor. It ensures that all the links added to your website’s content are in a good format, up to date and are placed in the proper path. In addition to this, the D8 Editor Advanced Link Module enhances the SEO by adding text information to each of the links of your website.
Protect And Pace Up Your Website
Speed and security of your site determine the reliability and quality of your website. Search engines rank secure and fast websites. Just the SEO tricks cannot make your site great, if it can get hacked. With a lot of hijackers around you waiting to hack and steal the private data of your customers and threaten you, it is vital for you to protect your Drupal site and your customer’s confidential information. Speed turned out to be a critical criterion to top the list of Google searches in April 2010. In other words, when every other aspect of your site is equal to that of your competitor, faster site will get a higher rank. Hence, it is essential to build a fast loading site within the available budget.
Drupal’s default methodology, responsive web design further enriches the SEO as Google prefers sites that serve mobile devices also. In this setup, the same HTML code is sent to all devices by the server. CSS changes the visuals on the page for every mobile device. The same URL can be used for all the pages to share and drive traffic to your site. The Google AMP module can be used to enhance the mobile responsiveness.
SEO is a game of inches. A title tag without a keyword or body, or a metadata that is not well structured can do nothing to your site except for kicking you off the top search results of Google. Using these six great methods will help you drive your way to a rocking Drupal website.
If you don’t find enough time or proclivity for optimizing your Drupal site, get in touch with us. DrupalPartners can help you device the finest Drupal 8 SEO strategy.Whether it is for a new site or for a site that is getting migrated to Drupal from another platform, just give us a shout, our Drupal developers will help you out.