This step by step guide will introduce you to the powerful tools Drupal uses for SEO or, "search engine optimisation". Better SEO means better rankings on sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, which in turn means more traffic to your site.

1. Enable Clean URLs

This is a big, big SEO gain for little work.

Lets compare a URL from the drupal.org site with another popular CMS site, joomla.org.

'http://forum.joomla.org/viewforum.php?f=432&sid=c54951146451084ff326cc3a1bd0ddd7'

If a search engine crawled this page, the best they could tell is that is had something to do with joomla and it was a forum. This makes it difficult for google to rank it highly if you search for 'Joomla Security' for example.

'http://www.webcurl.co.uk/blog/5-reasons-use-drupal-ubercart-your-e-commerce-solution'

In contrast, this link to another of our blog posts is very clean and descriptive, google could deduce from the URL that it is a blog post regarding Drupal, Ubercart and e-commerce.

To enable this feature simply navigate to"Administer" => "Site Configuration" => "Clean URLs" and enable the option.

2. Install essential SEO modules

If you are unfamiliar with Drupal and how to download and install contributed modules, refer to the earlier post How to install Drupal Modules.

These SEO modules are great for automating the repetitive tasks that is essential for a healthy page ranking for all conent.

• Pathauto - This module automatically creates a descriptive path like the one above based on  the content of the fields, saving you time.
• XML sitemap - Whenever you create new content on your site, XML sitemap rebuilds your sitemap and submits it to the major search engines, giving them a helpful guide for crawling your site.
• Page title - This module changes the <title> tag of your page for you based on the title of your content, this is also a huge factor for relevant page ranking.
• Meta tags/ Node words - This module allows you to edit the meta tags that appear at the top of every page. Search engines use meta tags to describe the content of the page using keywords.

3. Optimise performance

In April, google announced that they are now taking site speed into consideration. This means site owners and SEO specialists are going to have to pay attention to the speed of their site as well as the content.

Luckily, Drupal makes this very simple. Not only does it combine all your external CSS and javascript files into one or two files, it also minimises them for optimal file size.

Drupal also performs caching, allowing regularly accessed content to be served quicker. For in-depth information on caching with Drupal, see Improving Drupal Performance: Caching.

To configure these options navigate to"Administer" => "Site Configuration" => "Performace".

A useful way to check the page speed of your site is to use Yahoo's Yslow tool. This measures many factors of the site and gives it a ranking based on it's performance.

By default Webcurl uses all these SEO techniques in our Drupal CMS Packages.