If you are enthusiastic about Best SEO Practices for Drupal Websites in 2024 and want to grow your website traffic, you are just in the right place! Drupal is like a wise friend on the web who helps you complete tasks quickly without understanding many programming details. Also, it has some cool tricks that make your website both Google-friendly and user-friendly. And here we go, deeper into optimizing your SEO for Drupal!

Drupal SEO Checklist in 2024

All right, let's make a rough Drupal SEO checklist.

1. Technical stuff: This means altering your site to make it easy for search engines to find and recognize. Think of speed, redirects, and all the geeky details that keep the Internet flowing rapidly and properly.
2. On-page magic: This is where you polish your website`s web pages so that they are transparent as well as helpful to both humans and search engines. These include titles and meta descriptions and ensuring the content is well-crafted to give what people seek.
3. Off-page wizardry: This is about how the World Wide Web sees your site. Are other sites offering you virtual handshakes in return for backlinks to yours? Are you the object of buzz on social media? And last but not least, remember that E-A-T stuff – expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. 

These days, Google uses more than 200 different factors to judge rankings. It's up to you if you wanna check them out, but we think it's a little bit of a slippery slope.

• Serve up awesome content: Just be sure it is spot-on, and people look for it, finding what they're looking for on your site.
• Keep it smooth and snappy: Make sure your website functions seamlessly. Nobody likes waiting for ages!
• Build your rep: Prove to the world you're the real thing and that your reputation is good. It will help you a lot!

Check your website Drupal SEO Health

SEO for your Drupal site must be optimized first to be in its best state. Conduct a comprehensive examination of your condition by using a few free resources. So, you should set up the Google Search Console first. 

• What keywords do you think are bringing people to your site?
• Are there some pages that get more clicks?
• From where are your visitors arriving?
• What are the devices that people use to surf your website?
• How many sites are linking to yours?

Google Search Console informs you about your site's SEO status and allows you to improve smoothly. But let's not forget the Drupal SEO Checklist module, too – it's like having a personal trainer for your SEO project!

Google Analytics is your other best mate for tracking your site's performance. You'll learn all about your visitors: who they are, the pathways they use to reach you, why they are loitering, and how long they stay around.
You'll have a firm hold on your site performance and where adjustments are necessary to improve your search engine rankings.

Research Keywords

Keywords are a kind of a hidden ingredient for successful SEO. They give search engines a lot of information about your site. Use work tools such as Google Keyword Planner or KW Finder to find the most appropriate keywords for your website.
Pro tip: Dedicate a specific page for every keyword to use the SEO opportunities you have fully.

Publish Up-to-date and Fresh Content

Content reigns supreme, my mate! It's what attracts people to your website and keeps visitors coming back for more. Consistency in content creation is required by regularly creating new and outstanding content. Also, don't forget the neat organization as well – structure is the basis!

Create Relevant Meta Tags

Have you ever noticed those short sentences under search results? Yeees, they attract your attention. That's where the meta tags come in! They serve as a summary (= quick look at) of what a page is all about.
However, they're not just for search engines – they also appear when your page is shared on other sites. Pretty neat, right?
Do you want to get a great HTML meta tag on all your pages? Look no further than the Drupal Metatag module. It's like your met-tag cousin, always ready to toil for you. It'll:

• Have the meta tags of your content created automatically?
• Put the most important meta tags in the <head> directly.

Having a Meta-tag in your team means that search engines will get to know your pages clearly and rank them higher in search results.

Need for Speed 

Time is very important because the Internet is a fast-paced environment. Search engines favor speedy sites, so it is essential to make sure yours is not lacking when it comes to this.
Many tools (e.g., Google Lighthouse and GTmetrix) can be used to test your site's speed. We're fans of GTmetrix, as it gives you scores on speed and even provides suggestions on how to speed up.
The speed of your site is not driven by rocket science. You can:

• Empower browser caching (it is an enabled feature by default for Drupal 8/9).
• Take into account moving to a higher hosting plan to improve performance.
• Optimize the lazy-loading of the images to reduce their size.
• Take a crash course in background optimization and backups.

Well, this might mean spending a little more bucks for better hosting, but who cares, as far as the site is wicked fast.

Mobile-Friendly Matters

This is very important because an incredible number of people are searching on their smartphones. Keeping your website mobile-friendly is crucial if you want to succeed in SEO. Furthermore, Google considers the mobile version first for indexing – how crucial is that?!
Try making changes to your site using tools like Responsive Test and Mobile-Friendly Test.
Good news for Drupal 8/9 users: your site is responsive already. Add no extra work – praise yourselves for that excellent SEO score.

Fix Broken Links and Tidy Up Your URLs 

When your website's links are busted, it's the same as slamming the door in your visitors' faces. Not cool, right? It affects their experience, and search engines don't like it either.
Fortunately, we have tools like Dr. Link Check to sniff out those broken links for you. But don't just use tools – if you find a broken link, fix it as soon as possible. Also, Drupal has covered you with the Redirect Module, which can redirect lost traffic to your site in case URLs get screwy.
Oh, and while you're cooking up new stuff, make sure your URLs are tidy as well. None of that messy matter – take the user-friendly and SEO-friendly URLs.

• Go to Administer > Configuration > Search and Metadata> Clean URLs.
• Let the tests do their job.
• Check the "Enable Clean URLs" box.
• Click "Save Configuration," and here you go!

Clean URLs mean that search engines can understand your pages better, and thus, you have more chances to rank higher in search results.

Round Up Backlinks, Spread the Word, and Get Noticed

Well, you've made some great content, so now what? The time has come to herald it far and wide and have the eyes of the world on your site!
One effective way of increasing your site's reputation is getting backlinks – it means other websites link back to yours. It tells the search engines you have what it takes to land a top spot.
How do you achieve those desired backlinks? Easy – build quality content and publish it everywhere. You know, make it natural, no fiddling. Similarly, vary it by connecting it to different pages of your website to strengthen the quality of those backlinks.

Top 6 Drupal Modules for SEO in 2024

If someone claims to optimize your SEO is as easy as putting in a plugin or module, don't get fooled. SEO is a bit of a complex thing. However, the modules will greatly assist with the technical part and the on-page changes. Take a look at the Drupal modules we like:

1. Metatag module: It's definitely your buddy. It automatically does all your meta tags, but you can always tweak them to your preference. Think of the basic tags, referral policies, open graphs, and Twitter cards.
2. Metatag AI: This thing will produce meta tags from your information. Just a heads up, though: to get great results, a paid account may be what you need. With the free version, you may face some changes.
3. Schema.org Metatag: Extending the Metatag module, this module lets you bring in some of that 'magic' from the world of structured data onto your site. It is good for extra information about the content of search engines.
4. Simple XML Sitemap: Doesn't every website need a sitemap? This module generates an efficient XML sitemap for your site so search engines would find it easy to navigate your pages.
5. Redirect: Redirects are like traffic signs on the internet superhighway. They point people to the right pages, useful when you've just reorganized your site or moved some content around. This module will make it easy for you to manage all those redirects. By the way, this module is maintained by one of our developers - pifagor.
6. Pathauto: Bid farewell to unattractive, mysterious-looking URLs. Pathauto does a nice job by giving you clean, search engine-friendly URLs based on your page titles. It looks professional and also boosts your SEO.

To sum up, remember, all the tools can be super helpful. But there's no better alternative for having sound knowledge and a strategic approach towards Search Engine Optimization. 
Need a hand in SEO? Send a message to our Drupal team!
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