Drupal Site SEO Fixes
The website CMS Critic rates Drupal in its top five list of the most SEO-friendly content management systems. Like other CMSs, however, Drupal relies on contributed modules to enhance its SEO capabilities. The "out of the box" Drupal settings can also be tweaked to improve the site's performance.
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Clean URLs
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Clean URLs may be disabled by default, depending on your Drupal installation profile. Drupal.org recommends enabling clean URLs for SEO optimization purposes, as search engines like Google may have trouble crawling sites with characters such as question marks in the URL. Click on "Configuration" then click "Clean URLs." Check the box to enable the feature.
Here's an example of what enabling clean URLs does to your user log in page:
Before: /?q=user
After: /user
Setting Preferred URLs
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Drupal site nodes are available at multiple URLs, including the "Clean" and "Non Clean" URL, as well as the default node path and the URL alias. This can cause duplicate content issues that could affect your search engine rankings. To fix the problem, you'll want to set preferred URLs for each node. Use the Global Redirect module to set automatic preferred URLs.
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Adding Metadata
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Although Google does not use the meta keyword tag when figuring search engine rankings, it does use the meta description. Adding the proper metadata to your Drupal articles can make your content more search engine and user friendly. There are a few modules you can use to set metadata, including Nodewords (Drupal 6) and Meta Tags Quick (Drupal 7).
Creating an XML Sitemap
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XML sitemaps help search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google index your webpages faster. Sitemaps are dynamically generated each time you create new content. The Drupal repository includes several modules for creating and configuring an XML sitemap, including XML Sitemap, Drupal SEO and Google News Sitemap.
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