Drupal SEO Masterguide 2023

The significance of SEO in digital business is no secret. Organizations invest thousands of dollars just to be on the top of the search engine result pages. Despite several tectonic shifts in consumer behavior, organic search delivers the most traffic. More on that later

SEO is more than just adding keywords.

An important part of doing SEO right is ensuring your technical SEO is set right. 

Apparently, organizations that have websites built on mature CMS like Drupal have to care less about technical SEO. All aspects of Google-identified site and page-level best practices are ensured out-of-the-box.

In this article, we’ll dive deep to understand different Google ranking factors and how Drupal ensures you stay on top of those trends.
 

SEO Objectives

Organic search remains the dominant source since budget restraints many marketers to opt for Google Ads for more visibility on SERP.

Best SEO practices not only ensure higher ranking but are also budget-friendly. 

According to research, 61% of Google traffic comes from organic searches. Before we move to understand SEO objectives, here's a look at organic SEO trends. 

Some of your SEO goals can be: 

• Brand Visibility: It simply means the rate at which your brand is visible to the target audience. SEO immensely helps enterprises to improve their brand visibility.
  
  The more people are aware of your brand online the better your chances of a higher conversion rate. In this digital age where people consume most of their information online, not having a solid online presence is simply not an option.
  
  Content marketing notably has a great role to play in brand awareness and when it gets infused with SEO it has the potential to make a significant transformation. 
   
• Better ROI: Good brand visibility paves the way to high ROI. If you use SEO strategically then your conversions will increase. On-page SEO is an effective strategy to rank higher on search engines and drive more organic traffic to your website.
  
  The more people visiting your website the more likely you will get better conversions. 
   
• Organic Traffic: Despite so many shifts in consumer behavior people still mostly use organic ways to search for any product/service.
  
  According to content marketing statistics 2022, quality content with optimized images can increase organic traffic by over 111.3%. On-page SEO addresses all of the tactics necessary for improved organic traffic.
  
  The improved technical aspects of your website contributed to a better user experience, ease to crawl, and thus increased organic traffic.

Let's understand some Drupal SEO modules that you can use to make your website SEO friendly and rank higher on search engines.
 

Site Level Factors & Modules

1. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation: Slow website load directly affects the search engine rankings. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation is a must-have module for websites with a lot of CSS/JS files which means this module compresses your frontend files and speeds up your website. 
2. CDN: A content delivery network is a distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers around the world. Website performance directly affects your search engine ranking and user experience. A website that takes an eternity to load will eventually lose most of its visitors. A CDN will distribute a load of your website across servers globally to reduce load time. This module will help the website in loading faster and thus improves user experience and website performance.   
3. AMP: AMP also known as the accelerated mobile page is an open-source framework launched by a joint initiative of google and several other tech companies. Accelerated mobile pages are lightweight and designed to give mobile users lighting fast and more engaging experience. This module converts web pages as per AMP standards and helps web pages to load faster on mobile and tablets. 
    
4. Search 404: 404 error occurs when a content of a URL is moved or deleted. It is considered bad for SEO as it hampers user experience and google bots also penalize such websites. When a web page is deleted or moved ‘search 404 module’ will do a search for URLs that are being moved or removed and show the result of the search instead of a 404 error. This improves the site’s SEO by making sure inactive URLs don’t hamper user experience by delivering the content as per the user’s query. 
5. Blazy: Lazy loading is a technique for waiting to load particular parts of the website, especially images- when needed. The Blazy module provides lazy image loading to save load bandwidth and help reduce bounce rate. It also helps in saving bandwidth for important information before the website load completely. 
6. Cloud Flare- This module helps your website load 30% faster, use 60% less bandwidth, and process 65% fewer requests. Cloud flare is a global network designed to make everything you connect secure, fast, private, and reliable. Fast content delivery and Improve SEO are some more features of cloud flare. 
7. XML Sitemap: In the simplest terms site map is an XML file that contains all your website URLs along with additional metadata about each URL. XML site map creates an efficient site map of your website that is easy to crawl and automatically gets added to search engines like google, bing, yahoo, etc. Site map links pertaining to the content, menu items, taxonomy terms, and user profile can also be added. 
    
8. Simple XML Sitemap:  This module helps your website in creating individual site maps for each webpage according to google guidelines and policies. Apparently, a simple XML sitemap helps your website get indexed faster on any search engine. This module creates multilingual site maps for entities, views, and custom links and it supports all Drupal’s content entities i.e. nodes, taxonomy terms, users, and menu links. 
    
9. Robots txt: A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. Use this module if you are operating numerous Drupal sites from a single code base and each one requires a distinct robots.txt file. This module produces the robots.txt file automatically and allows you to change it from the web UI on a per-site basis.
    
10. Schema.org Usage: Pages with micro formatting tend to rank higher on SERP. Schema markup help website create formatted pages that help search engines understand your content easily. This module specifies the mapping between content types and fields with schema.org types and properties. 

11. Menu breadcrumbs:  A website with a large amount of data would immensely benefit from the menu breadcrumbs module. As this module builds a navigational path for visitors that helps the website track users' exact behavior on the website and enhance user experience.
    
    
     

12. Easy breadcrumb: Navigational design of a website describes how different pages of a website are organized and connected to each other. When a site is easy to navigate it increases visit duration. The easy breadcrumbs module helps in creating an accessible navigational website structure that is easy to navigate. 

13. Link checker: This module is useful to detect broken links from the content. Both internal and external links can be checked via the link checker module. It occasionally removes broken links from your stored content by checking the remote sites and assessing the HTTP response codes. Broken links can easily be checked in the log/report section. In the “my account” section, author-specific broken links are stored. 

14. Menu attributes:  As the name suggests, this module helps you add extra attributes to your menu section like class, ID, name, style, relationship, and target. A well-organized menu helps users’ website accessibility and experience. 

15. Pathauto: User-friendly URLs are extremely vital for boosting your SEO efforts. Pathauto module allows you to generate a URL  based on your content. It is a must-have module for any website to make it SEO-friendly. 

16. Metatag: Search engines usually prefer websites with optimized content and meta description. The meta tag module creates structured meta tags for your website so that your website ranks higher on SERP.  In addition to that this module also provides support to meta tags from other social media sites. You can furthermore control how your content is going to appear on different platforms. 

17. Hreflang: Now if are not sure what hreflang is then it is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. When you have different geographies to target then your website should be multilingual. This module is best for websites with multilingual content. The Hreflang module automatically adds tags to your website’s enabled languages. 

    The multilingual website attracts a larger audience, improves the brand image, and has an edge over competitors. With only 25% native English speakers, it's a great opportunity to reach out to the rest 75%. 

18. External Hreflang: This module allows you to add hreflang for external sites to easily detect spammy and faulty websites. External links connecting spammy websites degrade the user experience and can damage your brand presence and online ranking. 

19. Redirect: Directing visitors and bots from one URL to another is called redirection. The key benefits of redirection are to improve user experience and help search engines better understand website content. The redirect module helps in merging websites, moving domains, deleting existing pages, and switching from HTTP to HTTPS. 

    301, 302, and javascript redirects inform the web browser that a page has moved from one URL to another and let visitors and users land on the right page.

20. Domain 301 Redirect: A 301 redirect sends all the requests from the old URL to the new one. Domain 301 redirect help in redirecting users to relevant pages and page relevance congruent with the user’s query help in good ranking. This module allows sites to 301 redirects to a domain that has been selected as the main domain. 

21. W3C Validator: HTML errors or poorly coded websites can hamper the site quality and bad site quality consequently damages your website’s SEO. W3C validator reduces the code size on your web page and adds value to your content. Small codes help your website loading speed on diverse platforms. It validates your HTML and CSS codes according to international coding standards.

Page level factors 

1. CKeditor: It is a rich text editor that helps users write or edit the content inside the webpage. It has a nice writing interface where you can easily format and style content like adding a head, sub-heads, and numbering and bullet feature for better readability. 
   
    
2. Disqus: Pages with lots of comments may be a signal of user interaction and quality. In fact, one Googler said comments can help “a lot” with rankings. Enabling comments on a blog has multiple benefits including the possibility. To engage with your readers and grow a strong community. Disqus module helps you integrate a comment feature on your website that helps your readers to better engage with your content.
   
   
    
3. Scheduler: This module can help content writers to plan and publish content as per their requirements. The scheduler module makes your overall publishing experience hassle-free and supports both Drupal 7/9. 
   
   Time Scheduling enables achieving your intended interest group in the circumstances they're on the web, regardless of the possibility of what that time is, hence it has a huge benefit in content marketing. 
    
4. Automatic Alternative Text: Alt text is basically an alternative text for images. The whole purpose of alt text is to improve accessibility by describing what an image looks like to the user who doesn’t have the ability to see it. 
   
   
   
   This module automatically generates an alt text for your images if you missed putting one. Interestingly google prioritize images with meaningful alt text and it can be helpful in ranking higher on google.  
    
5. ImageAPI Optimize: A blog with optimized images has always been the prime factor for higher ranking. Search engines prioritize images that have a proper title, description, alt text, file name, and caption. This module allows you to compress images without compromising image quality with flawless image optimization.
    
6. ImageMagick: This is an open-source software suite that helps edit, display, and convert picture elements and vector files. It’s also helpful in creating image thumbnails, color correction, and liquid rescaling which basically means rescaling the image without distortion. 
    
7. CKEditor Nofollow: A no follow link doesn’t authorize the website it is linking to. You can make no follow the link by Adding the “re=nofollow” code to your website. This module requires no modules outside of Drupal core and is used to add rel="nofollow" to links using CKEditor widget.
    
8. Linkit: Internal links are the inclusion of web pages connected to each other. It can increase the ranking of the other pages within your website. It helps both readers and crawlers to easily find your site. Linkit gives you a nice interface for searching and links to internal content on your website instead of you trying to look for URLs manually. Within the editor section, you can select which URL you want to interlink and you will get the asked result.  
    
9. Editor advance Link: This module helps you convert normal hyperlinks into a styled button. This module allows content creators and editors more control over link appearance or functionality. 
    
10. CKEditor Entity Link: Drupal entities (content, tag, files) can be easily linked with the help of CKEditor Entity Link. This module is compatible with Drupal 9 and with all content entity types. It allows you to choose which entity types and bundles to search for and also provides an autocomplete box to make entity selection easier.

Drupal SEO Checklist Modules 

1. SEO Checklist: This module is compatible with Drupal 8/9. As the name suggests Drupal SEO checklist module creates an automated SEO optimization checklist so that you can optimize your website hassle-free. If you are someone who likes to follow organized checklists for website optimization then this module is a must-have. 
    
2. Real-time SEO for Drupal: If you like writing your content according to SEO guidelines then this module is quite helpful. SEO is a great source for organic reach and a higher SERP ranking is the prominent source of it. While writing, real-time SEO for Drupal provides inbuilt SEO-friendly suggestions as per best SEO standards.
    
3. Requires on Publish:This module is required when your content is published or getting published. Requires on publish can be used when you have fields on your pieces of content, such as tags or SEO information, that editors don't need to fill up until the material is published. 

Conclusion

Drupal comes with countless SEO benefits and it delivers the best SEO results. All the modules that we discussed encompass all the features that can help you achieve the best quality results in 2023 and beyond. 

With changing Google updates and SEO trends, you need a technology partner that makes sure your digital game is top-notch. 

Our Drupal expertise ensures that your site measures up to Drupal’s capabilities in SEO and you leverage them for the top-most SERP rankings.

Looking to enhance your website’s visibility on Search Engines? Get the SEO results you want.

Contact us at [email protected] and let our experts help you out with SEO.