Pathauto – http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
Every Drupal developer is familiar with Pathauto. It ranks #5 on the list of most popular modules, with over 50% of all Drupal installs using it. Pathauto allows you to break away from the normal Drupal URL scheme, and start assigning semantic URLs to your content. ;Now the path to your careers page can read /careers instead of /node/165. ;If your URLs look like the latter example you are not only hampering the usability of your site, because /node/150 doesn ‘t really mean anything, but you are losing an improvement to your search engine rank.
Global Redirect – http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
Unfortunately, Pathauto works by creating aliases for your content, which is now accessible by both the Drupal default URL and the newly generated alias. Since this has the potential to be extremely bad for SEO, you will want to consider installing the Global Redirect module. ;Global Redirect performs many tasks, all of which work toward the goal of having only one canonical URL for each piece of content on your website. ;The most noticeable effect is that you will no longer be able to access aliased URLs using the Drupal default way, such as node/X user/X. ;When you attempt this you will be redirected to the alias. ; ;Search engines such as Google will pick up on the redirect and consider the alias to be the one true URL for that content, eliminating duplicate content errors. ;Advanced users, who desire more control over redirection, may also want to consider the Redirect module. ;Redirect provides most of Global Redirects features, as well as the ability to create custom redirects and see reports on how often redirects are occurring.
XML Sitemap – http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap ;
XML sitemap provides you with the tools to dynamically and automatically generate XML sitemaps that conform to the standards set by http://www.sitemaps.org/, used by all major search engines. It will also automatically, and periodically, submit the sitemaps to the search engines, ensuring that they have all the latest information. A sitemap can provide a significant benefit to your SEO, because it gives you a chance to describe the structure of your site to a search engine on your terms. With a sitemap you can ensure dynamic, or otherwise hard to reach, content has a chance to be properly indexed for the web.
Metatag – http://drupal.org/project/metatag
The Metatag module is gaining importance in maintaining a good search engine presence. Metatag and its submodules give you nearly full granular control over the meta tags used by your website using the normal CMS interface you are used to. ;Most importantly it lets you automatically generate unique page title, meta titles, and meta descriptions. Search engines will use this information to get information about the content of your website, and they will often penalize you severely if they contain duplicate or otherwise useless information.
You know that optimizing your SEO potential is the surest way to make your website a success; but with so many Drupal modules to work with, it can often seem overwhelming selecting the best for your needs. These are our favorites: What are yours?
