Optimise your SEO on Drupal: follow the guide!

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Referencing a website is crucial to attracting and retaining visitors. It enables your site to be ideally positioned in search engine results such as Google.

La content management platform (CMS) Drupal offers a number of tools and tricks that make this SEO optimisation easier. Let's find out together how to take advantage of these features to improve the visibility of your Drupal site.

Structuring the content of your site

Before delving into the technical details of SEO, it's essential to understand that to rank well, a page must offer quality, structured content. Search engines favour pages that are clear, well-organised and easy to understand, in order to improve search engine ranking.user experience. Here are a few key points:

Prioritise titles Use H1, H2, H3 tags to structure information according to its importance. The main title (H1) must be unique for each page and reflect its content.
Use bulleted or numbered lists They make the content easier to read and make it easy to list items.
Integrate images and videos Content: Rich and varied content is favoured when it comes to ranking. Bear in mind, however, that media quality is essential: choose high-quality, lightweight images that are optimised for the web.

Drupal and metadata

Metadata is information associated with each page that enables search engines to understand its content. Drupal offers several modules for managing this data:

Metatag module

The module Metatag allows you to easily define the meta tags tags for each page of your site. These tags describe the title, description, keywords, author and other essential elements for referencing. Not forgetting the OpenGraph tags (for social networks) and Twitter Cards.

Schema.org module

With the Schema.orgyou can add structured data comply with the standard of the same name. This standard has been adopted by Google, Bing and Yahoo ! to interpret the information on your site more accurately. This can have a positive impact on referencing by improving the display of your pages in search results (rich snippets).

URL optimisation

The URL structure of a page also plays a role in how it is perceived by a search engine. The more legible and relevant they are, the better their chances of being well positioned. Drupal offers several solutions for this:

URL configuration

All the content on your site must be accessible via the following addresses URL meaningful and easy to remember. Without optimisation, a page would have an address such as www.example.com/ ?q=node/123. It's not very attractive to users, nor to search engines.

To remedy this, activate theClean URLs" option in the general Drupal configuration. You'll then get clearer URLs, such as www.example.com/node/123.

Pathauto module

Even with the "Clean URLs" option, your page addresses can still be made more legible. The module Pathauto allows you to automatically generate custom URLs based on the title of your articles or other parameters. For example, you could choose to structure your URLs as follows: www.example.com/categorie/titre-de-l-article.

Optimising performance

The speed at which your pages are displayed is a key factor in improving the user experience and therefore SEO. There are several recommended methods for speeding up loading times:

Optimise image size Use tools such as ImageMagick or optipng to reduce file size without sacrificing quality.
Activate Gzip compression Compressing data between the server and the browser can halve loading times.
Cache static elements Drupal has page caching options for anonymous users, and automatic compression of style sheets and scripts. JavaScript.

Tracking referencing with Google Analytics

To assess the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, it's vital to measure changes in traffic to your site. The integration of Google Analytics with Drupal is child's play thanks to the dedicated module. You'll have a complete, customisable dashboard for tracking key performance indicators.

To find out more

This article has introduced you to some of the main practices for optimising the SEO of your Drupal site.

Many other modules and configurations are available to fine-tune your strategy. Don't hesitate to consult the Drupal documentation and take part in the community forums to discover all the possibilities offered by this powerful and flexible CMS.