SEO for Drupal 7

Previously vih.dk was a proud #1 in Google search rankings on the keyword “idrætshøjskole”, but now we slipped to 4th place. That is not satisfacory, so we had to step up over SEO-game. Recently the site was moved to Drupal 7 from a legacy site, and up until now we just relied on the basic structure of Drupal (which is already really good without enhancement).

However, we wanted to get back to number one on the Google search (we are still number one on the search at Bing)!

We focused on:

We focused on some simple elements to improve our position.

• Good architecture. The urls for the pages are important in the eyes of Google.
• Good content. We already had some decent content. We needed to improve how the content was marked up. We focused on the page title, meta description and the headings and the emphazised text.
• Good backlinks. We tried getting former students, blogs and online magazine to write stories about us and to link back to our site to improve our search ranking. That is not the scope for this article.

The chosen modules:

Good architecture was easily achieved using path and pathauto. We just needed to make som sane choises.

Good content was improved by using page_title and metatags_quick. I could not figure out how to override the page title on a pr. node basis, but am still investigating that. In metatags_quick we just enabled the meta description for nodes and taxonomies, and we started entering some data.

Still waiting for extra modules:

Waiting for metatags. We were hoping that metatags had finished development, and I guess we are switching to that module when it is stable as it seems to incorporate the other modules.

Waiting for contentoptimizer. We installed the content optimizer and hoped that it would help our fairly inexperienced editors to provide optimized content. However, it seems that the module is a very early alpha. However, when it works, we will get back with some information about how our staff was able to benefit from the module.

What do you focus on?

What are your focus, when you do SEO and what are your favorite modules the help you achive your goal for Drupal 7?

The result:

Google is still crawling the web. We will get back to you to tell you how the improvements worked for “idrætshøjskole”.