SEO

SEO for drupal - validating your robots.txt file

It is easily overlooked but it is essential to get your robots.txt file validated. You can use an online validation service.

Google indexing tips

Google page title

Google indexes 63 characters in the page title they use on the search results. Other search engines use longer titles.

Google meta description

Google indexes 155 characters from your meta description.

 

Title tags how to

I found this really good article which cuts of the waffle and explains how to use title tags effectively and actually explains properly why you shouldand should't do certain things without adding any SEO mystique (bull).

Drupal is excellent with the search engines, a good start is to employ the SEO site Checklist module which lists most of the essential techniques on setting up seo with Drupal.

Alternative to Global redirect module

Drupal has an issue for SEO in that it can appear to search engines to present duplicate content. e.g

  • node/34
  • /my-safe-url

There is a module called Global redirect which you can install, however you can alternatively edit your htaccess file and the robots.txt so you don't have to support yet another module.

Path Redirect Module

The Drupal Path Redirect Module is very useful when you are migrating an old site to Drupal. The earch engines will have your previous site indexed and be directing traffic to the legacy pages. You do not want to lose this traffic by sending them to a 404 page not found error. This is where Path Redirect comes in.

The rise of Pay Per Action

A new paridigm in charging for Adwords is emerging. Pay per action allows for advertisiers to only be charged when a specific goal is achieved after an adver is clicked. This will clearly provide a better return on investment for adwords style campaigns but clearly the cost per action must be more. I don't expecct advertising costs to go down but the return on investement surely will improve.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

I have always found the management of Adwords Campaigns slightly tedious. Whilst I apprecciate the benefits, it can turn into a full time job coping with a site having a big budget. One useful tool I use a lot is the Keyword Tool which is capable of taking a url and scrapig for suggested keywords.

Alternative search engines

There is an assumption these days that Google is the only search engine. However, it is not. There are some good alternatives, one I stumbled accross today is vivisimo.com which I found to be very useful in that you can browse categories once you have done a search.

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