10 SEO Plugins for DRUPAL 7

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is getting more and more importance during the past years and this is not very surprising!

Considering that many companies are now expanding their business to the online field, especially in the e-commerce industry, the competition to reach the first page of the search engine result pages is becoming tougher every month.

The solution to this well-known problem? SEO. Of course, you will have better results in the SERPs if your website is SEO friendly since its conception but if you have been missing this part for your website you can still increase your rankings. Here are the major SEO plugins for Drupal 7:

1.      Pathauto

The Pathauto plugin automatically generates URL/path aliases for different types of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) and the best part of this module comes from the fact that you don’t need to specify the path alias.

Then you will be allowed to have clean URL aliases such as /category/my-node-title instead of /node/4584. The aliases are based upon a "pattern" system that uses tokens which the administrator can change easily.

2.      Google analytics

The Google Analytics module allows you to directly follow your incoming traffic statistics into the back office of your website. The module allows you to add the following statistics features to your Drupal site:

• Single/multi/cross domain tracking
• Selectively track/exclude certain users, roles and pages
• Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto)
• Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages
• Custom variables support with tokens
• Custom code snippets
• Site Search support
• AdSense support
• Tracking of Goals
• Anonymise visitors IP address
• Cache the Google Analytics code on your local server for improved page loading times
• Access denied (403) and Page not found (404) tracking
• DoNotTrack support (non-cached content only)

3.      XML Sitemap

Sitemap is a tiny file located inside the root directory of your web server and is always an excellent way to get the robots crawlers to know where your content is located. You can change the settings in the administrative panel if you want to modify the priority rules and which pages are the most important to send to the major search engines.  

Submitting a sitemap to Google, Bing and Yahoo will indicate the crawlers where to find your webpages on your site, before they decide to do it by themselves. This ensures a faster indexing of your site, resulting in quicker rankings.

4.      Page Title

With the basic installation of Drupal, you don’t have the control over the page title configuration and the way it’s displayed.

Page Title is a very useful and powerful module which allows you to customize each and every page titles of your website. You can easily change the titles of content pages, basic pages, blogs and articles to optimize your SEO.

Setting up the page title is the main factor to be considered if you want to optimize your website with the SEO practices. The page title is the first thing that web crawlers browse

5.      Global Redirect

A helpful SEO-based module that helps Drupal to not have duplicate URLs so that your site isn’t penalized by search engines. Global Redirect does the following action on your Drupal installation:

1. Checks the current URL for an alias and does a 301 redirect to it if it is not being used.
2. Checks the current URL for a trailing slash, removes it if present and repeats check 1 with the new request.
3. Checks if the current URL is the same as the site_frontpage and redirects to the frontpage if there is a match.
4. Checks if the Clean URLs feature is enabled and then checks the current URL is being accessed using the clean method rather than the 'unclean' method.
5. Checks access to the URL. If the user does not have access to the path, then no redirects are done. This helps avoid exposing private aliased node's.
6. Make sure the case of the URL being accessed is the same as the one set by the author/administrator. For example, if you set the alias "articles/cake-making" to node/123, then the user can access the alias with any combination of case.
7. Most of the above options are configurable in the settings page. In Drupal 5 you can access this after enabling the globalredirect_admin module. In Drupal 6, the settings page is bundled into the module.

Once enabled, an alias provides a nice clean URL for a path on a site. However Drupal does not remove the old path (eg node/1234). The problem is that you now have two URLs representing the same content. This is dangerous territory for duplicate pages which can get you sandboxed by the search engines!

6.      SEO Checklist

The SEO Checklist module provides an updated list of recommended modules and SEO best practices for your Drupal based website. It is presented as a to-do list and presents each task into several points like Title tags, paths and content. The appropriate module is displayed next to each task with a short presentation and a description so you can easily set up the module.

The plugin also tracks the task done, includes several information such as a tag, date and provides a simple report.

7.      Search 404

Most of your visitors will type the right URL when they want to visit your website but sometimes few of them will write your URL with one or more mistakes, in this case the classical 404 page will be displayed.

With the Search 404 module you can avoid this issue as the plugin will run a search with the wrong parameter provided in the url and then display a list of the closest matches. This is a very useful plugin as it makes your website much more user friendly.

8.       Meta Tags Quick

This module is a must have for every website owner or SEO specialist who cares a bit about his website’s ranking. With the Meta Tags Quick, you can easily add and customize your meta tag descriptions and meta keywords to all your different nodes.  All of the meta tags (keyword, description, copyright) is treated as a separate field.

9.      SEO Compliance checker

The SEO Compliance Checker checks node content on search engine optimization upon its creation or modification. Each time one node is edited or published the module performs some checks and provides the user a feedback on the compliance of the rules. It introduces a hook to gather information about existing SEO checks in the other modules.

10.  Content Optimizer

The Content Optimizer module helps to increase your site’s search engine (e.g. Google) rankings by improving the on-page optimization variables and insuring your content is conform with Drupal SEO best practices. The SEO analyzer provides instant analysis of any site content to assure SEO best practices are consistently followed. The analysis displays vital content statistics and recommendations for improving search engine rankings.

See also:

SEO plugins for Firefox

SEO extensions for Chrome