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5 Essential Drupal Modules for SEO

Here at Avatar New York, we frequently use the open source Content Management System (CMS), Drupal, to build most of our content heavy websites.  In my opinion it's one of the best CMS's out there.  With that being said, it still has a few quirks.  One of my complaints is that it doesn't have a whole lot of SEO features built into the core (although it does provide for search engine friendly URL's via mod_rewrite).  Luckily, developers have created some pretty robust modules to fill in these gaps.  Here are 5 Drupal modules we recommend for SEO:

XML Sitemap

This module dynamically submits XML sitemaps to Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Windows Live.  You first need to setup your accounts with each of the search engines and then add in your account settings into the module.  Once done, you can tell the module to submit the sitemap any time you add new content, run it as a cron job, or run it manually.  One less thing to maintain!

Meta Tags

The Meta Tags module allow you to add meta tags and meta descriptions to all your pages.  It also allows for global keywords to be appended to the end in case your feeling lazy.

Page Title

This module allows you to configure pattern matching for you pages based on content type or section.  It just gives you more control and flexibility in creating your page titles.

Path Redirect

This one is so simple.  It allows you to create 301 redirects on-the-fly of any URL's you want on your site.  This is great, because you don't have to make any of the changes in apache and allows you to keep track of any redirects you have on your site.

Google Analytics

After signing up for Google Analytics, you just need to simply copy your account number into the settings and the module takes care of the rest.  It will dynamically put the google code in proper place on every page of your site (it even gives you control over this).  Next, just login to analytics to see your stats magically appear.