Search Engine Optimization comes in several colors, also known as hats, and flavors, let's call those implementations. On-site SEO implementation is taking what is currently on the site and tweaking it to be better read by search engines, or building that into the development of the site from the ground up. Off-site SEO implementation is usually done through building backlinks and general site popularity through viral content and other marketing concepts. While both are very important in getting your website noticed, we feel that building SEO best practices into our development projects, it is both a safe way and more efficient way to implement SEO for our clients. There is nothing more whitehat than building something for people that works well with search engines.
On-site SEO
A fresh installation of Drupal does fairly well at handling some key aspects of SEO, and the word on the street is that it handles it better than most CMS platforms out there. Along with the features built into the Drupal core, there are many contributed modules out there that can help configure your site better for search engines. Some of these useful Drupal SEO addons include Page Title, Pathauto, Path Redirect, and XMLSitemap. There are plenty more out there, but I would need to devote a post just for that. Keep an eye out for that post at a later date. In fact, there is a great module that helps get you familar with quite a few of the modules that help with Drupal SEO, SEO Checklist.
Aside from Drupal modules that help with SEO, there are plenty that will have the opposite effect on your site if you don't know what you are doing. This is something else that we take care of while developing our client's sites. If one was to enable a bunch of modules, and not know the effects they could have on SEO, they could see severely adverse affects on indexing by search engine spiders. This will lead to losses in traffic and could really be a drag to a site. Since we know what modules cause these ill effects to the on-site SEO, we set them up accordingly and change other settings needed to achieve the best SEO benefit of the sites configuration.
Off-site SEO
Let's face it, viral content is hard to conjure up. Even the best of the best flop on most of their linkbait and viral content ideas. Some people might just go out and start purchasing links in order to get their rankings up, more of a black hat tactic. This is not a best practice in the least, and could even hurt your SEO efforts if penalized by one of the search engines for doing so. This is why we feel that going with a total white hat approach and building SEO best practices into our work from the ground up is best for a long term improvement of Search Engine Optimization for our clients.
Websites need good SEO along with good content and/or services to get good traffic. Anyone who says just build it and they will come, is living in the 90s and probably doesn't get much traffic to their website, or to their client's websites. If you build it right, with SEO in mind, you are setting up a base for the site to do well with search engines without much further need to manage SEO and just work on promoting the site. Some peole in the Drupal community are striving to include more SEO related features into the core, but until they are more successful, we will be optimizing our projects with the modules availalbe from the ground up to make the best sites and features for our clients.
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