Drupal in my opinion is the most search engine friendly, out of the box, solution in existence today. However, with that said, there are still some things that need to be done to any installation to ensure search engine success, and save you from issues down the road.

Note: Keep in mind many of the tactics listed below are things that should be done from the get go. If you plan on implementing these tactics with a site that is already fully built, indexed and aged, then you are going to want to take different steps to ensure SERP disaster doesn’t ensue.

• First thing is first, turn on clean URLs (which is the same thing as entering /%postname%/ in the permalink structure section in WordPress) Navigate to Home > Administration > Site Configuration > Clean URL’s. You need to make sure your server accepts mod_rewrite or this is not going to work.

• Go download the Drupal page title module. It is going to take some tinkering to get this to work, but in the end gives you the flexibility of having different page titles than your headings.

To make this work you need to make sure your theme has a template.php If it doesn’t then you will need to create one (the page title module has an example one you can use). These lines need to be added to the ‘page’ hook of the _phptemplate_variables function.

if (module_exists(‘page_title’)) {
$vars['head_title'] = page_title_page_get_title();
}

• Next, go download the global redirect module. This will take care of the duplicate content issues that arise from having a directory and a page with the same exact content. Eg., www.example.com/duplicate & www.example.com/duplicate/ This module will automatically redirect the “/” version of the page to the non “/” version, thus creating one version. You can also do this on your own by modifying your .htaccess file, but this is an easier solution.

• You will also want to alleviate any canonicalization issues that your site might see from backlinks that point to non www versions or www versions. Use the following code in your .htaccess file to ensure this is taken care of.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• Drupal also creates duplicate content, similar to the directory issue noted above, in the /node/ section of your site. This is a very simple fix as well. Go into your robots.txt folder and block this section of your site with the following code:

Disallow: /node$

• Make sure you also download the Drupal Meta Tag module, this allows you to insert meta tags and description tags for each page/article you post on the site.

What other modules do you use to make your Drupal site SEO friendly?

WordPress and Drupal are two of the most popular content management systems being used today. Both CMS’s have their distinct advantages over the other. In this video I talk about the differences in the two and help pinpoint when to use one over the other.

Drupal Benefits:

• It is worth noting and understanding that Drupal is not exactly a blogging platform per se, as is WordPress, but it is a CMS construction kit. Hard core programmers can go to town on Drupal, front end and back end, and build it out however they like.

• The user profiles are extensible and allows for easy creation of membership sites and portals.

• The categorization of content in Drupal is innovative as well. However, it takes some time to understand the taxonomy of things, but once you get the hang of it, it really does make a difference.

• Drupal does a great drop of building out dynamic sites, something wordpress falters at.

• Drupal can be easier because the backend allows for themeing as well. If you want your backend to look like your front end for easability, you have that option with Drupal. People who are looking to design websites that they can essentially pass off to their clients might find Drupal to be a better fit. WordPress on the other hand has a set theme for its backend which cannot be changed.This can be a little confusing for the novice webmaster.

WordPress Benefits:

• Drupal can seem coarse for some bloggers, it is not very easy to set up for one, and modifying the code behind the scenes can be a nightmare for even some what savvy php coders. WordPress does a fantastic job of allowing for easy set up and creation, as well of modifying of code.
  

• There are literally thousands of free plugins and themes for wordpress. The community surrounding WordPress really does an outstanding job with this. Drupal doesn’t quite have as many plugins (called modules in Drupal) and themes to go around.

For further reading on this subject visit the Drupal community site.

I am curious on others thoughts, which CMS do you like to use and why?

This is the first of many How to Video’s I am going to be creating throughout the course of 2008. I go into brief detail on how to setup a meta refresh on a intermediary page, thus allowing google analytics to track RSS subscribers, for any blog using feedburner.

Please take note in the video I mention Meta Redirect when in reality I am talking about the Meta Refresh.

Here is the code you are going to want to use to make this work on your blog:

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”1;URL=/feed”>

(note: you might have to manually add the double quotation marks if you are copy and pasting the above code into your WYSIWYG web editor.)

Simply attach that in your <Head> </Head> tag on your “intermediary page”, eg., brianchappell.com/subscribe.php on my blog. Then point your link to refresh to the physical feed page on your blog. (if you are using wordpress then it default’s to whatever.com/feed) After that is set up, drop your google analtyics code within the <Body> </Body>

It is as simple as that. Wait 24 hours, and you should start seeing your goal reports popping up.
Keep an eye out for a more detailed post on how to also make this work with Google click tracking using javascript tagging.

Also take kindly in understanding this is my first attempt at video creation, so it’s FAR from perfect.