Optimise your Drupal site for better search results and sharing

Drupal site owners have a wealth of choices when it comes to maximising visibility on search engines. You have to keep your content relevant and up-to-date but by thinking carefully about the tools on offer, you can make the most of your content and see improvements in your rankings.

When you publish content, make sure you give your content a title that really makes it clear what your content contains. Don’t reuse titles either as this won’t help your content when it’s being indexed.

Depending on your Drupal configuration, you may be able to access and wish to alter the meta tags (the hidden tags) that help describe your content. Check with your site administrator as to how this is set up and make adjustments accordingly.

Your site should have a site map. This will be indexed by automatically. The site map indicates to the search engines how your whole site is structured - it also shows when content is being updated and also the relative importance you would like to assign to specific pages. Again, if you would like to promote some content, use the Drupal admin tools or talk to your site administrator. Search engines may then promote pages you have indicated are of particular relevance to your audience.

Check your 404 - page not found errors - and fix them. Your site almost certainly has the module installed and it’s good practice to check to see if people are trying to find content that has been moved or perhaps incorrectly addressed in a newsletter or email. You can easily then redirect the url and fix the error.

Sharing content can also help with achieving better ranking as your content is more widely viewed. Make sure f either use a service like sharethis.com or addtoany.com or else just use one of Drupal’s own sharing modules - there are several to choose from and your Drupal partner can advise you on the ones most appropriate to you. You may also require additional refinements for image sharing with platforms like Facebook.

Finally, I strongly recommend you proactively use your Google tools (not just Analytics but see if the Webmaster/Search Console can be used too). We also use matomo.org which is a great Open Source alternative to Google if data privacy is a particular concern.

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