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SEO

SEO = a complex approach to promote websites

Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the things left to take care of. The first thing to do is simple common-sense organization such as URLs, breadcrumbs and page titles all aligning and emphasizing key words for the content of the page. Definitely use the pathauto module to create meaningful URLs.

You might like to start with reading a background article on Drupal & SEO or take a look at the Varbase distribution, which has many of Drupal's SEO modules preconfigured. But the focus of your attention will be the SEO module list. Some of the modules are in the install of your group site, most are not.

What we would like you to do, using this list, is plan and document your own SEO-strategy and explain that briefly in your presentation.

Search engines like

  1. speed
  2. meaningfull URLs
  3. you to help them crawl and index your website properly
  4. hierarchy
  5. fresh content

SEO module list

Source: Finklea, Ben. 2017. Drupal 8 SEO: The Visual, Step-By-Step Guide to Drupal Search Engine Optimization. BookBaby.

  1. SEO Checklist
  2. Redirect
  3. Pathauto
  4. Metatag
  5. XML Sitemap
  6. Google Analytics
  7. easy breadcrumbs
  8. RDF and RDF UI
  9. Linkit
  10. D8 Editor Advanced Link
  11. W3C Validator
  12. Sitemap
  13. Search 404
  14. Yoast SEO
  15. diff
  16. scheduler
  17. AMP Suite

  • SEO Checklist: provides a to-do list with checkboxes of the SEO steps needed to optimize your Drupal 8 site

    • requires checklistapi

  • Redirect:

    • redirects visitors from old URLs to new URLs, making sure that any URL that ranks in Google will still resolve when a visitor arrives
    • also allows you to create manual redirects. If you move content, put the wrong URL on some printed advertising, or you’re migrating content, this is a valuable function

  • Pathauto

    • patterns for keyword-rich paths
    • requires ctools & token

  • Metatag:

    • Provides title tags and structured metadata on each page of your site
    • Giving you control over your HTML title tag is the most important thing that the Metatag module does. That tag is critical to your search engine ranking.
    • Besides handling the title tag, the Metatag module programmatically creates meta tags for your website. Meta tags are snippets of text that tell a search engine about your pages.
    • works also with tokens
    • content-types: create extra fields to hold metatags
    • https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ testing tool OpenGraph
      • By integrating Open Graph meta tags into your page's content, you can identify which elements of your page you want to show when someone share's your page

  • XML Sitemap:
    • creates an XML Sitemap of your content that you can submit to the search engines - /sitemap.xml
    • having an XML sitemap helps your SEO by giving Google a list of the pages that you wish them to crawl.
    • simple_sitemap is an alternative
    • submit sitemap to google
      • https://www.google.com/webmasters
      • add verification tag from Google Search Consoleto metatag
    • add xmlsitemap to robots.txt, standard for communicating your XML sitemap location + sitemap: https://yourDrupal8site.dev/sitemap.xml

  • Google Analytics

    • insights about your visitors including demographics, behavior on your site, where they found you online, what keywords they used to find you, and more
    • get tracking ID
    • Locally cache tracking code

  • easy breadcrumbs

    • uses the current URL (path alias) and the current node title to automatically create breadcrumbs
    • breadcrumbs help your SEO by revealing the hierarchy in your content

  • RDF and RDF UI

    • rfdui allows site builders to integrate Schema.org
    • which is a second, more robust standard than meta tags for marking up your content
    • functions similarly to meta tags except instead of being at the top of the page schema.org markup is placed directly on each bit of content that it is describing
    • You can implement Schema.org on your website using Resource Description Framework, or RDF for short. It’s a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications designed as a metadata model
    • example

  • Linkit: gives your content creators an easy way to create links, and it ensures that links added to your content are well formed, up to date, and automatically use the proper path

  • D8 Editor Advanced Link Module

    • define title, class, id, target, and rel for links in CKEditor
    • This functionality helps your SEO by placing more text information about each link on the page

  • W3C Validator

    • HTML and CSS checker
    • helps your SEO because badly-written pages might confuse the Google bot or even your visitors’ browser

  • Sitemap

    • provides an HTML sitemap that gives visitors an overview of your website
    • also displays RSS feeds for blogs and categories
    • makes it easier for visitors to find content and that improves SEO
    • increases visitor time on site and reduces bounce rate.

  • Search 404

    • tweak to the 404 page helps your SEO by making sure that old or badly written links to your site will still resolve
    • shows visitors alternative pages that might contain the content they are seeking

  • Yoast SEO

    • helps you optimize content around key phrases
    • it does this by evaluating the text on each node and comparing it to SEO best practices
    • It will give you a list of suggestions right on the node so you can implement them as you create content.

  • diff

    • shows differences between revisions to nodes
    • if you see an increase or decrease in traffic, it’s helpful to see which edits caused the change

  • scheduler

    • allows content editors to schedule nodes to be published and unpublished at specified dates and times
    • allows you to plan and execute your content strategy which is critical to SEO success

  • AMP Suite

    • By building AMP into your website, you enable Google and other websites to store specially formatted versions of your content on their servers.
    • That means that mobile users will be served a streamlined version of your content nearly instantly.