Drupal Modules For SEO Your Website Can’t Live Without

If you’re a digital marketer managing a website built on a Drupal content management system, there are a seemingly endless number of modules available to help make your life easier. With such a large and active user community supporting Drupal’s open source platform, there are modules already built that can address just about whatever need you have for your website, especially search engine optimization. Every digital marketer knows the importance of search engine optimization, but keeping up with all of the nuances and changes in best practices can be a full-time job. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to keep on top of the newest algorithmic changes from the search engines, so installing modules that help make your site SEO friendly can be a lifesaver. Here are our favorite Drupal modules to manage search engine optimization for your website.

Metatag

Metadata, generally speaking, is basic information that describes other types of data. When it comes to your website, we’re talking about meta keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, and meta robots. It’s important to use metadata as it helps search engines know the type of content on your site which can help improve your ranking and display in search engine results. The Metatag module lets you automatically provide structured metadata about your website. It also provide support for meta tags that allow control of how content appears when shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is critical to your website because it communicates with search engines, telling them when there is new content or when content has changed, allowing the search engine to crawl and index the content faster and start driving traffic to your page. The XML sitemap module creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specifications and can be automatically submitted to search engines including Google and Bing.

Pathauto

Making sure your website’s page URLs are search engine friendly is key to driving traffic. Drupal’s default it to assign your site pages a URL that includes the node ID number which is not only a poor user experience, but also a search engine no-no. The Pathauto module makes your URLs search engine friendly by automatically generating URL/path aliases without you having to manually specify them.

Global Redirect

Having duplicate content on your website can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings, so it’s important to make sure you have only one URL representing a piece of content. That’s where the Global Redirect module comes in. Because Drupal does not remove old paths which can result in duplicate content, Global Redirect will check your current URL for an alias and enable a 301 redirect to it if it is not in use.

Easy Social

Site traffic volume plays a role in your search engine rankings, so finding ways to get people to your website is really important. When you install the Easy Social module and add it to pages with shareable content like news, events, and blog posts, you can increase content sharing on social media, helping your search rankings.

Link Checker

Broken links on your website are a recipe for bad search engine optimization. Think about it. If a search engine needs to crawl your site for content by URL and it runs into broken links, it’s going to stop crawling and indexing. Using the Link Checker module will detect broken links on your website and report them so you can clean them up quickly.