“Out of sight is out of mind” – is something I heard a lot from my mother during my childhood when I’d suddenly find an old outfit that I’d hardly worn, and now, too small for comfort. All I’m trying to say is if your website does not show up in the first few pages of the search results, it is definitely out of our minds, lying in some corner of the World (Wide Web). SEO isn’t something that you fix-it-and-forget-it. To keep up with the rat-race, a SEO specialist should constantly ensure that your website pops up and stays in the first few pages of the search results, always!
It has become extremely important to get noticed when people are looking for things on search engines as that’s where you will get your potential customers. Thankfully, Drupal has some amazing tools that can help you optimize your Drupal website for search engines. And now, Drupal 8 has some out-of-the-box SEO features will enable your website get noticed even faster. Here’s how Drupal 8 just made your life easier:
By making your Drupal website load faster
Your Drupal 8 website will now load really quickly for front-end users as it uses several caching techniques that can cache all entities of a web-page (cache tags). Using a technique called BigPipe, it first renders the cached parts of the page and then the un-cached parts or dynamic parts that need personalization. Also, Javascript is not loaded by default for anonymous users and JS assets are loaded from the bottom, thus improving the page load time.
They’re Responsive – off-the rack!
When responsiveness comes out-of-the-box, it’s a lot easier to configure and set up a Drupal website that can harmonize with any device irrespective of size. Drupal 8 understands that this is the era of smartphones and is here to stay. A responsive design for your Drupal website will attract more users and thereby boost your SEO ranking.
Follows the Content as a Service Model
Content is no longer destined for a single browser. It should be able to flow freely to apps, mobile sites, social networking sites, etc. Drupal 8 provides this capability that allows you to control your digital content over various platforms in a single place.
Also offers some incredible SEO modules!
SEO Checklist
This Drupal 8 module provides you with a list of best practices and modules for a proper SEO. If you have already installed those SEO modules, it will tick them off your list and can also enable, configure and set permissions for them.
PathAuto
By default, Drupal gives its URLs id’s instead of a clean readable URL. The PathAuto Drupal module automatically creates a readable URL based on your content without having to create a path alias. Having a clean and readable path with rich keywords can help improve your SEO.
Redirect
The Redirect Module allows you to redirect your invalid URLs to new ones. Having your users land up on old invalid URLs can immensely affect your SEO rankings.
MetaTag
This Drupal module lets you add meta information like keywords, titles, meta descriptions etc. for every page of your Drupal website. This will help in giving information about your web page to the search engine.
A few extra pointers
- Use keywords that are relevant to your content and that have high ranking. Using tools like MOZ tool, Google keyword planners etc. can help.
- Always have relevant and good quality content that is a 100% original on your website.
- Titles and Descriptions are a must-have for good SEO.
- Add Alt texts to your images because search engines cannot read your image but will capture its text and description.
- Your websites headers play a very important role in boosting your ranking. Use relevant keywords for each oh your headers and titles.
