SEO checklist for Drupal users

With Google knowing over a billion pages by now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become more important then ever in order for websites to be found by their target audience. Usually it's rather obvious from Google's webmaster quality guidelines what has to be done to get a good ranking, the tricky part however is not to forget a crucial component. So here is a checklist of things to do when using the Drupal CMS:

Setting up Drupal

While Dupal already does a pretty good job out of the box concerning SEO, there is still room for improvement by employing a few additional modules and applying some configuration tweaks.

• Enable the clean URLs feature. While Google is able to cope with URLs containing the "?" character, it does not look too pretty on SERPs. You wouldn't want cryptic strings to appear on your business card, would you?
• Install the pathauto module. It takes clean URLs one step further by automatically and systematically allowing you to alias each page with an URL, that actually reflects it's contents, e.g. by putting the page title in the URL. This does not only look appealing in the SERPs, but also provides more keyword association.
• Install the path_redirect module as a companion to pathauto. With it, pathauto can be configured to leave a 301 redirect in place when updating an URL alias. This avoids breaking existing links and ensures the new URL inherits the old URLs ranking.
• In case you have legacy links, pointing to unaliased URLs, install the global redirect module to avoid producing duplicate content.
• Install the nodewords module. With this module you can individually set the meta description tag of each page (including the meta description of the frontpage). Again, this helps making SERP results looking prettier, as the meta description (if available) is shown between page title and URL. There is no need to pay attention to the meta keywords tag, though, as search engines have learned not to rely on this one.
•  Enable the ping module.
• In case your website is very content rich and aims at returning visitors, social bookmarking will be a strategy to consider. Install the service links or diggthis module.
• Install the pagetitle module. It allows to set a page title, that differs from the node's title and hence provides opportunity for putting more keywords into prominent locations.
• Enable taxonomy and setup vocabularies. Consider using taxonomy VTN and/or tagadelic for internal link building.