Early on we made the decision to standardize our website and the websites of our clients on Drupal 7. Because Drupal is so good at SEO, it makes our job a lot easier to get our clients found via Google. One thing we have learned and use as well are a number of SEO modules that make it easy to make SEO changes on a page by page basis or on a global basis. Here are the modules we use on all of our sites for SEO.

Drupal SEO Modules

• Page Title – This module gives you control of the Page Title. It allows you to use the Token module to set dynamic Page Titles so you can use the keywords from the title of the article as well as taxonomies and the name and location of the company.
• Path Auto – A great module to use with Clean URL that lets you automatically set the URL structure for each content type so you can have something like http://yourdomain/taxonomy/vocabulary or http://yourdomain/content-type/title
• Global Redirect – This module searches for the alias of a current URL and then 301 redirects if its found. This keeps duplicate content from arising, which Google does not like.
• Redirect -We have seen too many sites suffer from bad URLs both internally and externally so they don’t get the SEO juice from them. The global redirect module sets up a 301 redirect and pushed a link to the right
• Search 404 – Anytime you have someone land on your site from a bad link. Rather than show a 404 page, this module shows keywords that are similar. This is so people can go onto the next page.
• SEO Compliance Checker – This is a great module that appears after you are done writing copy. It tells you if you are missing Alt Tags in images or title tags in URLs. This has saved us numerous times.
• XML Site Map – Google is pretty good at crawling sites, but it’s always a good idea to make sure Google has ALL the pages on your site, so submitting an XML site map can make sure all your pages are in the Google index.

These are the modules we use on DFM; as well as on our clients to maximize the potential Google will show your page during searches.

Late addition – As one of our readers pointed out, the MetaTag module should be on the SEO module list. MetaTag allows users to specify the meta description and keywords associated with a node.