Building websites with Drupal CMS and making websites SEO-friendly is a challenging task. Drupal development seems like a modular design that supports adding multiple features by adding suitable module installation.
Developers choose Drupal development for building eCommerce websites no matter if it is SEO-friendly or any corporate website. The site design enables site builders to incorporate effective SEO procedures into their workflows.
Drupal’s core is designed with SEO-friendly naming conventions, proper content tagging, and an accessibility emphasis in mind to make it easier for search engines to index and locate your website. Your site can rank well if it has relevant content, a correctly developed theme, and SEO-boosting elements installed.
Regardless of whether your site was created using Drupal 7, Drupal 8, or Drupal nine and later, optimizing it successfully indicates some special problems. Let’s examine what you should understand about Drupal SEO.
SEO Practices With Drupal Development
Keyword Research
Keywords play a vital role in ranking your website, whether developed on Drupal or other CMS. Target keywords directly enhance the performance of your website, and that’s why the SEO team is more focused on knowing the intent of the website and its product.
Your SEO strategy’s core function is to communicate to your audience what products or services you provide while utilizing the proper keywords to make it easier for them to find you online. A smart place to start when building a keyword list is using Google Ads Keyword Planner, as well as with ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush.
The website’s website’s main objective(s), such as providing information, turning visitors into customers, gaining subscribers, etc., should then serve as the basis for your website’s content.
SEO Web Content Generation
After targeting keywords, let’s utilize the content effectively. The content encourages users to know what you sell and why they buy from you. Moreover, when you put SEO-based content to your Drupal website, you ultimately call Google to rank your website.
Critical use of SEO practices connect your website to Google’s algorithmic environment. Although numerous factors go into a successful SEO practice, your content will eventually dictate how well you rank. You would be in a good position to rank higher with Google and other top search engines if your content is well-written, highly relevant, accessible, and meets a requirement of your audience.
If your content is strong enough, you should be able to gain connections from other websites. The more reputable these sites are, the more SEO benefits they pass on to you. However, Google has gone past this and prefers links from a range of websites of all sizes with high domain authority.
Analyze Your Data
You should be mindful of the data in the background that might guide your strategy choices over time if you want to stay on top of SEO. You may crunch the data with the aid of Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to get important insights that can help you with audience segmentation, landing page optimization, and better conversion routes.
Don’t Forget Social Media
We should use such relationships to sell our company as we grow increasingly interconnected through the many social media platforms that significantly impact our online environment.
Simply said, social media has become a crucial component of dynamic marketing, and Google is giving it more weight in its search algorithm.
Get more info: Why Choose Drupal Web Development Over Other Options in 2022
Non-Content Factors for SEO Rankings
Although it is outside the purview of this article to discuss SEO ranking variables for on-page content, Google’s search algorithm takes hundreds of other factors into account in addition to content when determining where a web page should score in the results.
It includes three factors, such as:
- Website performance
- Adaptability and accessibility
- Mobile-friendliness
Drupal Website Performance
A key component of Google’s ranking system is performance. If you are working on drupal website development, then the website must load swiftly and react to clicks and other user activities.
In Drupal, there are various techniques to enhance website performance, such as:
- Optimize images according to SEO practices and compress them to make the website lightweight.
- Use CDN to make your content deliverable throughout the regions.
- Use the most recent caching technology.
- Javascript and third-party libraries should be lessened as much as feasible.
- Use a hosting company optimized for Drupal, such as Acquia or Pantheon.
- Implement performance profiling to address performance issues at the code, database, server, or browser level using tools like Google Lighthouse or New Relic.
Although SEO focuses on search engine optimization, it truly centers on visitor optimization. Google wants users who engage on the sites in its search results to have a positive experience. Users will lose faith in Google if the page runs slowly or provides little value.
Using a dependable, rapid hosting service, creating your website on a strong platform like Drupal, and optimizing the information on your site to load as soon as possible are all steps towards improving the performance of your website.
Adaptability and accessibility
User experience (UX) and accessibility go toe-to-toe and are both significant concerns for Google. Once more, the key to solving this problem is to give users a convenient experience that impresses Google.
Add alt tags to your photos, check that the code that creates your pages is well-formed, and logically organize your material using headers, subheadings, etc.,, to increase the accessibility of your website. These are only the fundamentals.
In addition to mobile-friendliness, which we discuss below, other factors that affect user experience (UX) include the page’s visual stability, how quickly it loads, and how engaging it is. In our SEO post, we go through these elements in greater depth.
Mobile-Friendly Features and Functionalities
Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets account for more than half of all searches conducted online. Mobile traffic grew by 222% between 2013 and 2019.
Websites must have a mobile-friendly layout that is simple to explore on tiny displays because so much online browsing is done on mobile devices. Additionally, there are a variety of mobile device sizes, thus well-designed websites have a responsive design that can adapt to various sizes.
Google places a lot of emphasis on this element since it has a significant impact on user experience, just like it did with the first two. It won’t be a pleasant experience for someone using a smartphone to conduct research if they get on a website that doesn’t adapt properly to the small screen size.
Must-Have Modules For Drupal SEO
Drupal development is not responsible for optimizing SEO for your site by default. You have to add relevant modules to set the SEO standards. You must add several modules if you want to increase its SEO performance. These modules improve each page’s numerous components by adding functionality or altering how Drupal configures them.
SEO Guidelines
Drupal web development provides Drupal SEO Guidelines that do not directly affect your site. Instead, it includes a checklist of SEO best practices that can be used to evaluate the optimization of your site and spot areas for development.
It will help you remain on top of such changes without taking a lot of effort to keep up with the most recent news because it is updated often as Google adjusts its algorithm.
Meta Tag Module
You may quickly add metadata to the pages on your site using the Metatag module.
Meta Tags are tags that the HTML code uses to give search engines structured data. This includes details such as the page title and description that appear in the search results, Facebook and Twitter social media data, and several other bits of information.
Most of the time, website visitors cannot see this information. It exists only to aid search engines in understanding the content of your page, how to present it in search results, and how it connects to other websites.
Real-Time Insights
This Drupal module helps drupal web development be more exciting as it helps to generate real-time SEO when including new pages. You may improve your Drupal pages as you write them with the Real-Time SEO for Drupal module. The length of your text, the metatags, the usage of subheadings, and other crucial elements are all checked.
This makes it easier to optimize the SEO when you write a new article so you don’t have to go back and make changes afterward.
Redirect Module
Setting up redirects on your website is simple by using the Redirect module. This allows you to eliminate duplicate material on your site by redirecting URLs to a “canonical” page. This is done through the Global Redirect module for Drupal 7 only.
Because it is more difficult for Google to determine which page to direct searchers to when there is duplicate material, it might harm your Google results. Instead of speculating, it can just make you seem lower in the rankings.
Menu Breadcrumb
The Breadcrumb menu module is another effective module when it comes to organizing the hierarchy of websites. It helps visitors as well as Google to authenticate the web pages more quickly. The more your Drupal website is organized, the more you have chances to increase your SEO ranking.
Menu breadcrumb navigates the right direction of your site so Google can easily crawl the maximum number of web pages and optimize first-handedly.
Google Analytics
Tracking is simple to include on your website thanks to the Drupal plugin for Google Analytics.
Although Google Analytics doesn’t immediately help your SEO, it does make it simple to track a variety of data about your website and the people that visit it.
That data may be used to discover popular sites, pages where more people abandon your website, and a variety of other things. You may choose where to concentrate your SEO efforts once you have that knowledge.
Pathauto Module
Pathauto module helps to make SEO-friendly URLs of web pages. It is the most important aspect of Drupal web development and Drupal SEO to make web pages more optimized.
The link generated by default includes domain names and node numbers. They are very identical to each other except for the node numbers. This makes complex to identify the pages why Pathauto modifies the page’s address to use specific URLs instead, like this:
This is considerably clearer to the searcher and much easier for Google to digest, which will probably result in a better click-through rate in the search results.
Search 404 Module
The Search 404 module allows you to simply search your website by redirecting any 404 errors to a search page. By doing this, you may be able to lower your bounce rate for Google visitors.
A “404” error will appear if someone attempts to access a page on your site that doesn’t exist. If they get there via a Google link, they’ll often click back right away and attempt another connection. It’s referred to as a “bounce.”
To prevent a bounce, this module directs users to a search page with any terms in the URL already typed in the search form.
XML SiteMap
An XML sitemap helps to find out web pages on your site by developing sitemaps. Google and other search engines drive traffic when they authenticate your page by appearing on your site on the Google search console. Every time you make updates to your website, the module will automatically publish the sitemap through Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools).
It helps Google in determining the importance of each page on your website and the pages it needs to crawl. More often, higher priority pages are crawled.
Menu Attributes Modules
You may add properties to menu items so that you have more control over what they do using the Menu Attributes module.
The “no-follow” tag, for instance, can be added to menu items if you don’t want Google to give them any weight. By directing Google not to pass any PageRank with the link, you can connect to pages on your own website or another website.
Bottom Line
The essential Drupal SEO modules are described and now it’s time to apply them to your Drupal website to make your Drupal development more effective. If you are struggling with Drupal development, then you have a choice to outsource your project to the leading and trustworthy Drupal development services like MMCGBL.
At MMCGBL, you will find the best Drupal services as we have done some big and outstanding projects. Successful projects are the proof of satisfied customers and that’s how we tend to build trust in ourselves. If you are keen to see our project then you can see our MMCGBL portfolio or for taking one step further by contacting us. We have streamlined the project cycle, experienced developers, and excellent team collaboration.
Working on the Drupal latest version and knowing the thick and thin of Drupal development with Drupal SEO is now easy for us. Drupal itself is a vast CMS platform where developers need proficiency and expertise to tackle the complexities of building business websites. So, don’t take a risk on your long-term growth source.
