SEO optimization for business impact
Advanced SEO techniques for businesses involve much more than standard SEO optimizations and high-quality content. Digital experiences that captivate your website audience depend greatly on CMS-specific optimizations.
When it comes to Drupal, SEO optimization seems simple enough at first sight. A majority of the most popular Drupal modules have been designed with SEO in mind and, as a result, they are relatively easy to optimize. However, Drupal does come with its own particular and sometimes less well-known features that can have a significant impact on your website’s Google search rankings.
In this e-book, you will discover ten technical, Drupal-specific SEO tips. We share the most common SEO pitfalls in Drupal and explain their potential impact on your business. We also share our tips and solutions to help you counter these problems.
In this blog you will learn more about 10 SEO pitfalls in Drupal:
Tip #4: Public entities
Problem
By default, entities are publicly available through their own unique URL. For example, a team member module might generate a public node for each team member, whilst these are only used for the team overview page and the website might not need a subpage for every team member. In Drupal, the URLs for these entities look as follows:
https://mysite.com/node/42, https://mysite.com/taxonomy/term/42, etc.
This results in low-value pages that are fairly thin on content - not an ideal situation for indexation by Google and other search engines. Redundant pages are a waste of resources,including bandwidth, crawl budget and database storage.
Solution
You can prevent irrelevant entities from being accessed by your website visitors. In Drupal, the rabbit_hole module does an excellent job at this.
Tip #7: Module overload
Problem
Modules are a blessing to work with and they solve a variety of problems. Nevertheless, there are limits to any module-reliant CMS, including Drupal. An excess number of modules can slow down your website significantly by downloading multiple resources to your visitors’ web browsers. A sluggish website is detrimental to your SEO score and has a negative impact on your visitors’ user experience.
Solution
Prevention is better than cure. Avoid modules that are too complex or not strictly necessary on your environment. If you are using a module as a shortcut or quick fix, looking into alternative solutions might be a valuable alternative.
In addition, you should check your website for modules that are no longer used on your website. You can verify this using the unused_modules tool.
Conclusion
Competitive SEO strategy
Using the above strategies, you can take on a majority of Drupal’s SEO pitfalls. Anticipation is the key: in-depth analysis and smart configuration of settings can avoid the bulk of technical SEO-related problems further down the road. You should also bear in mind that every business case and website is unique, which implies that your SEO strategy should be bespoke as well. A comprehensive SEO audit will be able to kickstart your website optimization track. This way, you can generate added value and competitive advantage for your business.