Drupal content organization and search engines

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Using Drupal to organize your content

Drupal is not just a way to easily manage large amounts of content, it actually helps you keep that content organized and structured as well. This is a terrific asset to your SEO campaign. Search engines want to know what your site is all about: primary topics, subtopics, related headings, and so on, all help. By using the built-in Drupal tools, your site can be in top shape for the search engines.

Structure your site hierarchically

There's a reason you learned the outlining format in grade school. It's easier to organize related ideas when they're structured hierarchically. It turns out that it's easier for search engines to figure your site out when it's structured that way as well. So, send a long-overdue thank you note to your fifth grade language arts teacher and let's get organized.

It keeps things organized

Organized content is useful content. Keep similar ideas together and your site will be more useful to your visitors. It's also easy to see where you might have a weakness in your site's content. If you've got five pages on topics A and B, but only one page on topic C, then you know where to focus your writing efforts. Finally, Drupal allows you to create RSS feeds around any topic. That makes it easy for visitors who are interested in new widgets to keep track of your R&D department while avoiding the content about your cat's latest misadventure in the garbage disposal.

Google likes it better

Search engines also need to work in an organized manner. It turns out that search engines organize around much broader concepts than just keywords (although keywords are still the most important element). To find related words that will help your ranking, try typing your keyword into Google, in the following manner:

~yourkeyword

This is an approximate, or synonym, search. It finds terms that are related to the one you're searching for. Pay attention to the bolded items in the search results and you'll see keywords that Google considers approximate and relevant. Write content around those terms and Google will rank you higher. This is true even if the original term didn't show up in your content.

It's easier to build keywords into your categories

If you have great categories and loads of content in those categories, it's easy to add a few relevant keywords to the category pages. If your content is spread out over too many categories, or it's not organized at all, it's almost impossible to get all those ideas onto one page.

Siloing

There's a fancy word going around in SEO circles called Siloing. It's the concept of building your site around a series of concepts that are all related to your primary site topic. Basically, you build different sections of your site on subtopics that all support the main idea. In other words, build your site hierarchically and organized around categories. It turns out that Drupal's built in modules do this for you already, which is another reason that Drupal is the best platform for SEO.

Using taxonomy to organize around the main topics

For the main content of your site, you should create a taxonomy category with a handful of keyword-rich terms that all of your content will fit under. Do not allow free tagging in this main content category as it creates too many categories and becomes a nightmare to maintain. If you want to have free tagging for other types of content, like blogs or products, (and it's a good idea in many cases) then create a separate taxonomy for it.

Don't go crazy with deep hierarchies. It makes sense in some cases, but a good rule of thumb is that no content should be more than three clicks from the home page. Obviously this doesn't apply if you have 10,000 pages, but for most sites, this is very easy to achieve with a good directory structure. The closer the node is to the home page, the more important Google thinks it is, and the higher that individual page will rank (remember, this is a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule so don't destroy your site's usability to make this happen).

Creating structured URL paths

Using Drupal, it's easy to build the illusion of structure into the paths. You can easily set up the Path module to create paths that look like the following URL: http://yourDrupalsite.com/products/fastcars/bens-ferrari.htm When the content really exists at /?q=node/123. This can be very helpful for your organization if you set up a category page at /products and /products/fastcars. This gives your site a nice, clean hierarchical structure, making it easier for visitors to find their way around.

Removing content

Not all content is good content. There will come a time when you want to take something off of your site. If you want to be friendly with the search engines, don't just unpublish the node. Search engines are crawling through your site on a regular basis and assigning value to each page. If you delete a page, you're just throwing that value away which is a loss for your site.

Take the time to do it right and you can redirect all of the search engine goodness that your page carries to another page on your site, or even to another web site entirely.

Here's a quick checklist for deleting or moving a piece of content. Before removing the node or page:

1. Decide which existing page on your site will catch all of the traffic that used to go to the page you're deleting. Or, you may need to create one. This page should be in some way relevant to the old page.

2. Remove or update all links to the page that appear on your site. Visitors will find those broken links and get frustrated if you don't update them.

3. Do a backlink search using Google Webmaster Tools, by carrying out the following steps:

• Log in to Google Webmaster Tools.
• Click on the domain you're working with. You'll see the Dashboard, scroll down to the Links to your site section and click on the More button.
• Click on the number, located next to the page you're removing, and you'll see a list of the sites linking to that page.

4. Email everyone linking to that page letting them know that the page is moving, and ask them to update their link to point to the new page.

5. Set up a 301 redirect using the Path redirect module.

6. Test the 301 redirect.