Drupal - An Essential SEO Tool
So you have decided to use Drupal. What you should know is that you've picked a great platform for building your web site. It's widely held that Drupal is one of the best choices if you want to rank well in the search engines. Many experts believe that it's hands-down the best possible platform for SEO
SEO is necessary—you've got to do it if you want to rank well for keywords. Simple in concept, keywords are actually very complicated things. They bring order to chaos, define markets, and reveal intent. Keyword data simultaneously tells you how many people are looking for your product or service and what those people will do once they find you.
The results of a keyword search can tell you who the top people are in an industry and inform you of upcoming trends in the market. Keywords are the most visible focal point of free market competition between business interests. Search engine optimization is a popularity contest for keywords and this is a popularity contest you want to win.
Drupal and SEO
The most critical part of an SEO project is finding the right keywords. You will spend months working on your web site, getting links, and telling the world that your site is the authority on that keyword. It's critical that when you finally arrive, your customers are there to embrace you. If you pick the wrong keywords, you'll spend months working only to find that there is nobody who wants to buy your product. An extra few hours researching your keywords in the beginning will help you avoid this fate. Drupal actually has the solution to that.
Millions of random people visit Google every day. When they arrive, they are amorphous—a huddled mass yearning for enlightenment with nothing more than a blank Google search form to guide them. As each person types keywords into Google and clicks the Search button, this random mass of people becomes extraordinarily organized. Each keyword identifies exactly what that person is looking for and allows Google to show them results that would satisfy their query. So, what can Drupal do for that?
Much like a labor union, the more searchers there are looking for a particular phrase, the more clout they have with the businesses who want to sell to them. However, instead of more pay and better health benefits, you get better search results. If there are a thousand people per month looking for keyword A and a hundred people per month looking for keyword B, then chances are good that there are more competitors focused on keyword A. More competition means better optimization is required to show up at the top. Better optimization requires more content, closer attention to meeting the needs of the group, and more interesting web sites.
Drupal has a built-in search engine—another great tool to see what the people are searching for, after they've already visited your site.
The first step in convincing Google that you are the best is to tweak your site so that the keywords show up in all the right places. These changes to your site for the search engines are collectively called On-Page Optimization. Thankfully, because you're using Drupal, it's a lot easier than it might be otherwise.