Drupal is the best CMS for SEO

Submitted by 01am on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 20:24

Acquia webinarAcquia webinar
Listening to a webinar from Acquia right now. The talk is by Ben Finklea of Volacci, entitled "Best Practices for Drupal Search Engine Optimization and Driving Site Conversions"

In Ben Finklea's opinion Drupal is by far the best CMS for SEO. I can certainly agree that in my experience sites get listed and indexed very well. Tools like Path and Pathauto really help as google loves page paths that are logical and differentiate different information. In addition the performance stuff in google also helps as its now using speed as a ranking element.

One really nice thing that was mentioned was this site:
http://www.seo-browser.com - this shows what your site looks like to google - very useful expecially if you're using lots of images/flash etc. Google needs text and h1/h2 etc tags

Use this to do lots of other smart stuff:
https://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

XML sitemap for Drupal which you can them submit to search engines will do you much good too. Use the dev version here for drupal 6
http://drupal.org/node/449710

you'll be able to get more info here soon (this one isn't on there right now as its still on - but it should be once its finished)
http://acquia.com/community/resources/recorded_webinars

UPDATED:
here's some more bits and pieces that should be helpful
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

heres details of a book on this subject for Drupal
http://www.volacci.com/webinar

Comments

by Anonymous - 01/07/2010 - 20:28

*Most* of the open source CMS

*Most* of the open source CMS tools in use today are capable of exactly the same granularity in URL structure. This smells like linkbait...

by 01am - 01/07/2010 - 20:45

not my words but those of Ben

not my words but those of Ben Finklea from Volacci.

There's many other elements that make Drupal very good out of the box. RSS feeds come out of the box, Views module can easily make a feed of any list of info. modules like XML Sitemap, Google Analytics (which gives you very powerful analytics options, involving choosing which pages to add, and automatic download of the google script) and many more make SEO tasks very easy.

I've also found that Drupal makes it very easy to built a site that will work very well in SEO terms with Flash. julianopie.com is an entirely flash site - the Services module makes it very easy to get all the content from the CMS into Flash, and I automatically get an extreemly friendly html site for Google to see by using browser detection with the SWFObject and SWFAddress modules - every bit of the flash and html site have the same URLs

Not really sure what you mean by this being linkbait - i'm not associated in any way with the webinar or its speakers, and don't make money off the back of this. I'm just keen to share useful info to the rest of the geeks out there.

by Anonymous - 04/22/2010 - 19:03

http://www.endlessrise.com/

Hey! I'm no geek, but I'm very much interested in information such as this. I've been an SEO for four years now and an SEO Reseller for 2 years, and one of the things that you'll learn on that time span is that Flash-based sites are a pain to SEO. Especially now that Google has considered the time to load the pages of a site as one of the factors in determining SERP rankings. Drupal, at the very least, lightens the burden for SEOs. Thanks for dropping the info on your site. Now back to viewing Lolcats!