5 Drupal SEO modules - essential modules for all sites

Out of the box, Drupal SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is pretty good. But there's definitely extra work that you can do to make it even better. In this short article I want to focus on a selection of Drupal SEO modules which provide fundamental enhancements that I think should be included in the Drupal core itself some day.

It doesn't matter if it's a personal blog, a corporate website or a graphic designer's portfolio, these Drupal SEO modules should be used for all, and will help ensure that your site is as search engine friendly as it can be.

Drupal SEO modules

pathauto

Pathauto lets you automatically create human friendly (and search engine friendly) URLs for your nodes. You can define exactly how you want the URLs to be constructed by using special variables from the node itself (title, date, author, taxonomy terms etc). In effect, you end up with paths like mysite.com/an-article-about-fishing, rather than mysite.com/node/23 for every node you create, with little effort after the initial configuration.

globalredirect

If you're using pathauto (above) to create aliases for your nodes, you'll end up with two paths that each node can be accessed by (mysite.com/an-article-about-fishing AND mysite.com/node/23). Search engines will see this as duplicate content and this will drastically harm your search engine rankings.

The global redirect module ensures that old node/x paths will redirect to their aliases in a search engine friendly way (301 redirect), thus eliminating the problem of duplicate content. It also fixes the trailing slash problem which can be another cause of the duplicate content problem.

xmlsitemap

An XML Sitemap helps the major search engines index your content properly. This module will automatically generate and maintain a complete sitemap for website and gives you fine-grained control over exactly which parts of the site you want to be included in the index. It even gives you the ability to automatically submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Windows Live every time you update a node, or at specific intervals.

robotstxt

A robots.txt file is important for ensuring that search engine spiders don't index the wrong bits of your site. This module gives you the ability to manage your robots.txt file through the CMS, just like every other aspect of your Drupal site.

nodewords

This module allows you to set custom meta tags and descriptions for your nodes, which gives you the ability to target specific keywords and phrases. Some people may disagree, but I'm still of the opinion that meta tags do help with your search engine rankings, if only a little.

In summary

All of these modules help to make Drupal SEO a painless and effective task, and every one of these is part of my core module collection with which I start off with when building a new Drupal site. They are all available for both Drupal 5 and 6, so no excuses! Did I miss anything?