Drupal SEO: Optimise and Rank Your Drupal Website

Drupal is an open source content management system, which, along with its versatility of providing free cms, advanced SEO features, more than 2500 free themes, and over 53000 free modules, and catering to large traffic and complex website design requirements, is the choice of almost 1.2 percent of websites known for using content management systems.

To further elaborate & understand its statistics, Drupal is used on 3.1 percent of the top million websites & 7.5 percent on the top 1000 websites.

It is the choice of many top businesses, including NASA, Tesla & Nokia,.

Drupal has the advantage of supporting extra traffic, and not only that, despite WordPress being the most widely used CMS platform, Drupal still has some key features that outperform WordPress.

Let us have a look at what SEO key points we need to consider when working on Drupal SEO optimization, what built-in SEO features Drupal offers and what SEO modules can be used to further enhance the performance of Drupal websites or stores.

SEO and Drupal Websites Ranking

Drupal SEO strategy does not have to be radically different from the SEO strategy required by websites created by any other CMS platform or website developers. Since search engines follow similar rules of indexing and ranking websites, there is a similar requirement that should be followed by you for Drupal ranking.

The only key difference will be where the SEO Modules of Drupal come into action to help you boost your SEO strategy by providing built-in SEO tools to cut your SEO time and enhance your website ranking quicker.

To make it easy to understand what your Drupal Search Engine Optimization should be and where Drupal comes into action to help you with the modules for Drupal SEO, we shall cover this SEO practices checklist on a comparison basis.

SEO Checklist for Drupal Ranking with 10 Best SEO Modules for Drupal

Meta Title and Meta Description

Meta titles are basically the SEO titles that appear in your SERP results, and they are linked directly to your SEO. They should be between 50 and 60 characters long. Meta descriptions, despite not being a direct influence on SEO, do impact the click-through rate of your website. Appearing right below your Meta titles, they can provide a call to action for your visitors to click and visit your website when used strategically. Incorporating your primary keyword in the Meta Title and description is helpful.

Drupal SEO Module for Meta Data: The Metatag module by Drupal provides you with SEO friendly manual or automatic structured meta tags, including the Meta title, meta description suggestions and also meta tags like Twitter cards for Twitter or Open Graph Protocol from Facebook to provide you a control over how your data should appear on social media.

Keywords and Quality Content

Content is the king of blogging and ecommerce platforms. Your content is the primary factor that will help your website or ecommerce store get indexed and ranked to reach a larger audience and generate revenue from increased traffic and conversions.

When it comes to content, you should consider some significant points, including:

• Your content should be of value to your audience.
• Your content should provide a solution to your audience for their problems or search queries.
• You must search for your audience’s intent and interests and find important keywords that your audience is typing online or searching for using the voice search feature.
• Consider using your keywords wisely in your blog posts and product descriptions without making them feel stuffed. Also, consider using some long-tail keywords, as most people now use voice commands for search. Using long-tail keywords could provide you with an edge over competitors if they are not using them already.
• Keep creating content consistently and keep posting it regularly. Search engines prefer websites that keep themselves updated and provide new information and value online.
• Update your old content by adding new information to it, if needed. Do not forget to show your recent modification date on your posts so that people know you consistently update, and they build trust in your website and come back more.

Drupal SEO Module Content Management: Real-time SEO for Drupal is an excellent module by the cms. This module helps you check all the points from keywords to content length and the metadata. It guides you along the process of writing a blog post, making sure your end product is search engine optimized and of high value to your audience.

SEO Friendly URLS

SEO friendly URLS are those URLS that are clean and easy to read. These contain words separated by hyphens and are usually short. Such links not only provide a better user experience but also help search engines understand the context of your page based on your URL.

SEO friendly URLS are considered a ranking factor by search engines. Hence, they should be of great interest in Drupal search engine optimisation. Drupal generates default links that are not seo friendly, which makes it difficult for search engines. By changing these, you can improve the chances of your website’s SEO and Drupal ranking.

Drupal Module for SEO Friendly URLS: Pathuato is the most widely used SEO module for Drupal. This changes the address of the website pages into clean URLS. This module automatically generates the URL structure based on its type, keywords, and taxonomy.

Redirection And Drupal SEO

Having a website, you will often face issues with broken links. Having broken links means having the chances of error 404 on your website when your audience tries to reach out to these links. This not only creates frustration in your user’s experience, but it may also negatively impact the bounce rate of your website, hence imparting a negative impact on website performance.

It is always advisable to check your website for broken links. You can redirect these links to other pages of your website, which may help your audience to get a better user experience and also show the search engine crawlers that your website is structured and all links can be crawled, increasing its potential for ranking.

Redirect Module by Drupal: You can download the Redirect Module by Drupal to redirect your broken links to working links, hence improving the crawlability of your website and improving its ranking ability as well.

Robots.txt File

A Robots.txt file is basically used to direct the bots or crawlers of search engines not to crawl specific pages of your website. Crawlers have a daily crawl budget to crawl your website pages within a particular period of time. If you have not stopped their access to unnecessary pages, then they might use their crawl budget on those pages rather than crawling useful pages that need to be indexed.

A robots.txt file enables you to stop crawlers from accessing unnecessary pages of your website to improve their crawling efficiency, aiding better indexing of your website pages, which indirectly influences your SEO.

Robots.txt SEO Module for Drupal: Drupal provides RobotsTxt module for managing your robots.txt file. You can edit the file as per your preferences.

XML Sitemap for Drupal Indexing

An XML Sitemap helps your website be indexed by search engines, helps it be visible online and appear in search results, and increases its chances of getting ranked. Having an XML sitemap is very essential, and sometimes we need to submit it manually to different search engines to broaden the visibility of our website over search engines other than Google.

Simple XML Sitemap Seo Module by Drupal: You get to download and use the Simple XML Sitemap Module by Drupal. This is an excellent module that automatically generates a sitemap for your website and updates it upon modifying your content as well. Additionally, the sitemap generated by this module also helps you with multilingual content indexing by generating image sitemaps and hreflang sitemaps.

You can use these sitemaps and submit them manually to Bing Webmaster Tools to index your website on additional search engines and use the same strategy for the search engines you wish to index.

Multilingual SEO for Drupal Ranking

Having multilingual blog posts or a website that can be translated into multiple languages with proper SEO targeting each region, you can increase the visibility and ranking potential of your website.

Drupal Multilingual SEO Module: As we mentioned earlier, Drupal outperforms WordPress in many ways, and multilingual SEO will be one of those. Drupal offers multilingual SEO options by providing its translation modules, which help you read different regions and target audiences speaking different languages and improve your search engine ranking as well.

Hreflang Module by Drupal automatically adds <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”” href=””> tags to serve the correct language or regional URL in search results that are used by search engines.

Keeping SEO Check as per Google Algorithm

Google is the most widely used search engine, and most websites are competing to rank here. With time, Google keeps changing its algorithm, hence maintaining sites in the loop to make improvements in their structure and SEO strategy to maintain their search rank.

Drupal Module for SEO Checklist: Drupal provides you with SEO Checklist module. This module keeps updating daily with the updates in Google algorithm, hence helping you to stay ahead in your SEO game by following the recurring changes in the algorithm and adjusting your website to them in a timely manner.

Artificial Intelligence and Drupal SEO

We cannot deny the impact of AI on every industry, including the online world. Today, AI is a major part of every search engine and application that is used worldwide. When it comes to Drupal Ranking and SEO, you can leverage artificial intelligence to help with Drupal SEO for your website and cut down the time you spend on doing so manually.

AI SEO Module by Drupal: Modules like AI Content Strategy help you to analyse your website content and, based on this analysis, identify gaps for your website and suggest content ideas and ways to enhance the credibility of your website among your audience.

Website SEO Monitoring With Analytics

Once you have successfully implemented SEO across your Drupal website, you need to consistently monitor your website performance and SEO metrics to ensure your Drupal ranking in search engines for your website or e-store.  The most effective way to achieve this is to have analysis tools that monitor your traffic and audience behaviour and provide you with insights into your performance.

When it comes to website analysis, nothing works better than Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Both platforms help you to monitor the performance of your website and the user experience and behaviour, with the former helping with the performance and position analysis, indexing, and broken link issues, and the latter helping with audience behaviour and traffic analysis.

Drupal Google Analytics Module: You can get access to the Google Analytics module in Drupal, which can assist you with tracking your website statistics.

You can also copy the verification code from Google Search Console and copy it to your Drupal website theme using the Metatag module and configure the GSC settings easily.

Additional SEO Practices for Drupal SEO

Now that we have discussed almost ten major SEO practices that are required for Drupal SEO, along with the available  SEO modules for Drupal ranking, let us briefly go through other search engine optimization settings that will help you improve your Drupal website ranking.

• Always select a fast hosting provider. A hosting provider is very crucial for your website’s ranking. A hosting provider that provides optimal performance, an SSL certificate, and fast speed helps boost your ranking.
• Always use responsive images that can adjust to various screen sizes and different devices. Optimize your images with Alt text and add descriptions to your pictures, making sure that they provide accessibility ease to visually impaired and also help search engines understand the context of your image and help index your images, which helps improve your SEO.
•  Internally link your old content to your new blog posts. This helps to provide link juice to old articles, provides a structure to your website, and keeps every link crawled and indexed, which helps with SEO and ranking.
• Make sure the themes that you are using are mobile-friendly. Almost 62 per cent of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Seeing this potential, search engines consider mobile-friendly websites a high-ranking factor, which indirectly becomes an essential part of Drupal website SEO.
• Generate backlinks for your website. Write guest posts on high authority websites in return for a quality backlink. Having quality backlinks increases your domain authority and chances of ranking your Drupal website.
• If your business is physically based in a local area, then you must take advantage of Local SEO with your Drupal website. Add your business in Google Business Manager and connect the details with your website. Target local SEO keywords or location-related keywords in your blog posts to attract your local audience and generate more leads and conversions towards your business.
• Use structured data always. This helps you generate rich snippets and improve your website’s SEO.
• Optimize the speed of your website by enabling JavaScript and CSS in the settings of Drupal, using a CDN network, and reducing the size of images by compression without losing their quality.
• Repurpose and update your old content by using new keywords, and make sure your updated content date is visible to your audience and search engines, increasing the user experience and showing search engines that you are a valuable source of informatio,n hence improving your chances of getting ranked.
• Keep a track of upcoming trends in the SEO industry and follow and implement the changes in your seo strategy accordingly to scale your website’s growth and maintain your rankings in the search engine.

Final Remarks

Drupal is an outstanding open-source content management system that helps you build a website without having technical or coding knowledge. Drupal provides you with a website that can handle complex websites and massive traffic as compared to all other content management systems. Being used by many famous businesses worldwide, Drupal can help you maximize your website rankings and improve your online business presence with practical SEO modules that are mostly free of cost.

Following the SEO checklist and strategy of this article, you can enhance the Drupal ranking of your website and improve your Drupal search engine optimization to its highest potential.

If you wish to compare the SEO checklist for WordPress with Drupal, then you can read our Ultimate SEO Guide for WordPress.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, Drupal is very SEO friendly. You need to grasp the idea of using its SEO modules and proper seo configuration to get the benefit of SEO.

Pathauto, Metatag, Redirect, XML sitemap, SEO Checklist and Simple XML Sitemap can be considered as the essential SEO modules of Drupal.

Yes, you can use the Pathauto module to optimise your Drupal URLS.

Yes, you can integrate GSC by adding its property verification code using the Metadata module, and you can also incorporate Google Analytics using the Google Analytics module.

You can make use of the SEO Checklist Module to track your website’s SEO, and along with that, you can also keep an eye on your GSC and Google Analytics reports to see the website’s performance, which will help you with your SEO.