10 must have modules for Drupal SEO

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Drupal. It is a great framework for building webistes and the community is very active. And from an SEO point of view there are basically no limitations to what Drupal can perform.

In this post I will tell you about the 10 best modules I use for SEO purposes when buidling a website in Drupal.

Path

This is a core module that allows users to maually edit the URL to any node. This means you have full control over the URL to any page of your site.

Clean URLs

This is actually not a module in that sense but more of a feature. If enabled this feature turns domain.com?q=node/1 URLs into domain.com/node/1. This is the first step of creating optimized URLs. With the Path and Pathauto modules you can craft your URLs into perfection. 

Token

This contributed module doesn't do that much for SEO on it's own, but it is used by a number of modules that improves SEO of your Drupal web site. 

Pathauto

This is a contributed module that allows Drupal to automatically generate URL aliases based on Tokens. So if you need optimized URL's on your site, Pathauto is the module that will get you there.

Path redirect module

This module is one of my favourites. It gives me a user interface for adding 301 redirects to my site! So if a page's URL is changed for what ever reason, with this module you can easily define how the old URL should be redirected.

Page Title

With this module you can use patterns based on tokens to automatically genereate optimized title tags. A very useful feature is that you can have different patterns for different content types.

Nodewords

With the Nodewords module you can specify meta description and meta keywords on the node level. Menaing you have full control over these tags on a page by page basis. This module also allows you to easily specify meta tags for Google Webmaster Tools verification.

Context

Anyone reading this who knows about Drupal and the Context module would know it is a great module, but how does it help the SEO of my site? With Context you can specify contexts of your site and add elements like blocks for instance, that will show up on all the pages within that context. So having keyword rich text links from relevant pages to a specific landing page is no longer a manual hassle!

Custom breadcrumbs

With this module you can specify patterns for breadcrumb generation on a content type basis. Nad as we all know, breadcrumb links very important if you want to create a good internal linking structure.

XML sitemap module

The name says it all. This module let's you configure an XML sitemap for your Drupal web site. Even though I am not a fan of using XML sitemaps, for other reasons, this is still a good module for the times when you really need that sitemap.