SEO & Drupal
A Primer
by Lauren Caple
What is SEO?
"the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine."
Search Engine Optimization
AKA appeasing the Google gods
What is SEO?
- Relevant, well written content
- Accessible website
- Effective user experience
- Properly written, clean, consumable code
Search Engine Optimization
Why it Matters
Supporting public facing websites means we're representing the organization as a whole.
We're a part of an organization
As with branding, how we present ourselves on our sites impacts all other sites on the uw.edu domain.
Why it Matters
Alt and title tags, readable image names, and well written content means happier users
It leads to a better user experience
Properly implemented meta tags makes it easier to share content on social media
Users find what they're looking for faster
Why it Matters
Both internal and external searchability improves
Search engines like it!
You have more control over how the image of your unit is portrayed on Google, Bing, etc.
Best Practices
Content is the bulk of SEO. Poorly written content riddled with typos that's not relevant to the site will hold a site back.
Content Startegy
- Avoid typos
- Keep it concise and informative
- Properly divide your copy with headings and sections
- Pick a style or voice for the site and stick to it
Best Practices
Images
- Use the alt attribute to describe your images
- Use the title attribute when appropriate to give relevant info
- Give all images hyphenated, readable names.
ex: uw-husky-mascot.jpg facebook-icon.png
Note: hyphens are read like spaces by spiders. Underscores are not.
Best Practices
Technical
- Use readable, hyphenated URLs
- Set your metatags for search engines and social media
- Give users the ability to add title and alt tags
- Setup your robots.txt file, even on your dev/staging environments (to stop spidering)
- Set page title tags to something unique on every page
- Properly implement HTTP redirects for moved pages
- Setup a sitemap.xml to get your changes spidered faster
Best Practices
Code-related
- Write clean, semantic code
- ex: <article>, <header>, <footer>, <address>
- ex: .social-media-icon{} vs .smic01{}
- Avoid Drupal's auto-generated "div soup"
- Use coding best practices for CSS, Javascript & HTML
- Don't use deprecated code, keep JS libraries up-to-date
- Load JavaScript at the bottom of your documents when possible
Drupal
Makes our job easier
There is a whole slew of SEO-helpful Drupal modules out there. Many are "Set and Forget" and once you implement them they do their job in the background.
Drupal
Modules of note
- Meta tag (set meta tags by content type, allow the user to edit per-node)
- Metatag Open Graph
- Pathauto
- Redirect
- Global Redirect (make 301 notices of redirects)
- Pathologic
- XML Sitemap
- File Entity (make alt and/or title image fields required)
SEO Crisis Averted
Simple setup can make it not feel like this:
When someone has an issue with SEO results
Copy of SEO & Drupal
By Lauren Caple
