Today we are looking at another aspect of Drupal Starshot that may not generate a lot of excitement, but will make it a lot easier for the average marketer or Drupal site builder to make their site perform well and be easy to find.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has often been treated as something of a dark art. Any number of self-proclaimed masters of this art will promise to take your site to new levels, their ability to deliver varies greatly.
Drupal CMS aims to provide ready-to-use tools to help improve search engine performance, and “SEO Tools” is one of the “goals” offered during the Drupal CMS installation. When this is selected, Drupal CMS will install modules and set up default configuration designed to optimize performance in searches.
Meta-tags may be somewhat old school, but they are still an important part of the data search engines make use of, so fields are provided to help set up quality meta-tag data.
Both a HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap are created to help map site content.
The Robots.txt module is set up and configured with the sitemap in mind.
The SEO Checklist module helps check off steps to a well-optimised site.
There are some things that were hoped to be included in the recipe but haven’t made it in yet.
One is the Real Time SEO for Drupal module, which helps to generate quality meta-tags. It was excluded because it would need patches to work in Drupal CMS. Hopefully it will be ready to add in a future release.
Another aspect that was being worked on was an SEO dashboard. It was removed after a user experience review, and it’s planned to be replaced by a panel in the main Drupal CMS dashboard. This would seem a more integrated solution, and should help make Drupal CMS a more holistic environment in the long run, but means the SEO dashboard will not be available in the short term.
Using the SEO tools in Drupal CMS may not change the world, but it can certainly help your site to perform better in search results.
Thanks to Jim Birch (thejimbirch) of Kanopi Studios for providing a lot of really helpful information on the SEO Track.
Comments