A Complete Guide to Drupal SEO best practices and Tips

Are you looking for the Drupal SEO best practices for improving your website’s SEO rankings? You came to the right spot. Drupal is one of the renowned content management systems used by various individuals, businesses and organisations. Although it is behind in terms of market share, what makes Drupal a favourite among digital marketers is its faster capability to build a powerful SEO strategy. 

With Google making changes to its core algorithms, it is no wonder that the hard-earned ratings might see a drop and this is where regaining the top position is important. Here we list some of the best Drupal SEO tips which you can use to make SEO way better than it was before, let’s get started.

Drupal and SEO

In the digital world, SEO is essential for businesses to stay relevant, visible and top of the search results. However, one thing worth knowing is that SEO has changed a lot over time. As for Drupal, various versions have launched over time with improved features. The release of Drupal 8 SEO gave more control to content authors and that legacy continues with Drupal 9. What makes Drupal highly preferred for building SEO? 

For starters, its built-in SEO capabilities coupled with powerful tools make it an obvious choice of CMS. It also hosts other features such as SEO-friendly naming conventions, faster page loading speed, and W3C capability thereby making it suitable for complex projects and a lot more. 

If you are building a custom website, the first thing you want is for your customers to find you first on search engines. Drupal search engine optimization is all about taking the steps to ensure your content can be crawled and seen by search engines and users alike. Now, let’s get on with the various practices.

Implement a Mobile-First approach

With the majority of people viewing websites on their phones, not making your business website mobile-friendly makes no sense and can reduce SEO rankings. As Google prioritize mobile-friendly websites due to the immense search on mobile devices, it is important to have a website whose contents are optimized for mobile viewing. One of the best ways to make sure your Drupal 9 SEO website is mobile-friendly is to make it responsive.

Download the best Drupal SEO checklist modules

Drupal boasts a plethora of modules or software codes to serve the needs of website owners. Some of these include:

SEO Checklist

The Drupal SEO checklist module lists a checklist of SEO practices that can be used to review your website’s optimization and identify opportunities for improving SEO rankings.

Google Analytics

Although it doesn’t improve SEO directly, this module helps add tracking to your website which helps track all the information about the website and the data of the customers visiting it.

Search 404

No one likes to see an Error 404 when loading a website and affects the user experience. Implementing the search 404 module redirects any potential 404 errors to a search page that helps visitors easily search your site. If you want to reduce bounce rates & get better SEO rankings, this is one of the best Drupal SEO tips to try.

XML Sitemap

This module creates a sitemap file that can be used by Google and other search engines to find web pages on your site easily.

Make sure to optimize URLs

Optimizing your business website URLs is important for improving SEO. Having URLs of web pages containing specific words that reflect your content usually ranks higher. One of the Drupal SEO best practices is enabling the clean URLs option on your website settings. This will allow you to change URLs that reflect the individual page content, rather than a URL with randomized numbers and letters. 

Ensure Website Accessibility

Another important Drupal search engine optimization practice is maintaining accessibility. A website’s accessibility feature is taken into consideration by Google and other websites for ranking in search results. The better the accessibility, the wider range of customers can access the website easily thereby, increasing the rankings over time.

Speed Up Your Website

This is one of the important Drupal SEO tips to consider if you want to increase SEO rankings. If your website is slow, then good luck getting it ranked higher on search engines. Slow-loading websites usually don’t rank well on Google and other search engines. It takes longer loading times which results in a bad user experience. This, in turn, is avoided by search engines. By making the website load faster, the user experience is ramped up. 

Focus on Keyword Research

One of the most common Drupal SEO best practices is the use of keywords. They play a vital role in getting higher SEO rankings on search engines. Incorporating relevant keywords into your website content allows you to drive potential audiences to your website and offer them the right information. Performing keyword research will help you get the higher ranking ones which can be incorporated throughout your content, placing them in relevant URLs, and including them in page descriptions.

Conclusion

Here you go, these are some of the Drupal SEO best practices that can be implemented to improve your website’s SEO rankings on the search engine results. This ain’t the entire list but there is a lot more that you can know all about by consulting with GTECH, one of the reputed Dubai digital marketing agency.