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Often I see people asking what are some simple things I can do to get better rankings in search engines. Well with Drupal one thing you can do is a no brainer. Every Drupal site that cares about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must first enable clean URLs and second must install Path Auto. For those of you who don’t know what these are let me elaborate just a bit.

Clean URLs

A lot of CMS’s including Drupal if its not set up correctly will use values in the URL query string when displaying a webpage. These look like your-drupal-site.com/q?=blah&5 or something similar. Now search engines have gotten better and better at knowing what to do with these but in general they can sometimes get confused and think that these are just parameters for filtering or such and not see them as separate pages. What this means for you is less pages indexed and less people seeing your site. To turn clean URLs on you can simply choose them when you install Drupal or you can navigate to the Administer –> Site Configuration –> Clean URLs menu (your-drupal-site.com/admin/settings/clean-urls).

Once you enable clean URLs, instead of seeing the /q?=blah&blah you will see something more along the lines of your-drupal-site.com/blah/5.

Path Auto Module

Once clean URLs are enabled you will start to have a lot of pages that look like http://your-drupal-site.com/node/1, http://your-drupalsite.com/node/2, etc. Although these are clean URLs they are not very descriptive ones. It would be much nicer if they said something like http://your-drupal-site.com/blog/drupal-rules/ or something similar to that. Path Auto allows you to do this.

Once you download and install the Path Auto module you can go set up default paths for the different types of posts you will do. Navigate to Administer –> Site Building –> URL aliases and click on the Automated alias settings tab.

From here you will see a bunch of settings. You can set all of these up so that paths are created automatically for you. After you set these defaults up each time you add a post it will automatically get a relevant URL assigned to it. Very helpful for search engines and also for people as they link to your site.