SEO essentials

SEO stands for search engine optimization: adjusting your website’s content and structure so your pages show up more prominently in search engines. This page defines the terms you meet across the rest of this guide’s SEO pages.

What good SEO does for your site

Good SEO helps your website to:

• Increase visibility, so more people discover your website.
• Reach the right audience, attracting visitors who are genuinely interested.
• Enhance brand credibility: appearing prominently in searches gives your brand authority.

Optimizing a site might sound daunting at first, but it is one of the best ways to grow your audience. Good SEO gets your content seen by more people, improves your site’s authority, and increases the likelihood of reaching your goals, from selling products to gaining subscribers to increasing readership. The SEO Tools recommended add-on for Drupal CMS provides the tools to evaluate and enhance your site’s optimization; see Install and explore SEO Tools.

Meta tags

Meta tags are special HTML tags that describe the content of a web page. Search engines use the metadata they contain (information about a page or site) to understand, categorize, and rank content in their result displays. People encounter this metadata as the title or short description shown in a search result or social media post.

Some examples:

• The SEO title, the clickable headline shown in search results, lives in the title tag:

  <title>Explore Premier Oregon Wine Tours | Oregon Wine Tours</title>

• The SEO description, a short, engaging summary that appears under the SEO title on search results pages, lives in the description meta tag:

  <meta name="description" content="Join our curated Oregon wine tours and savor the finest local vintages.">

• Social media tags define which images or descriptions social platforms use when people share your page. Open Graph tags (prefixed with og:) and Twitter tags (prefixed with twitter:) drive the link previews on social media:

  <meta property="og:site_name" content="Oregon Wine Tours">

In Drupal CMS, meta tags are added to your pages as you create or edit content. No coding skills required.

Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines when looking for content. Stuffing keywords into meta tags was once common practice, but it is now outdated and discouraged. What matters instead is engaging, well-structured content that naturally includes the topic and the words your visitors actually use when searching.

The Real-time SEO module in Drupal CMS adds an SEO analysis section to content editing pages with a Focus keyword field. The field is not for hiding keywords in the page: it checks, as you write, how well your content matches the words or phrases your audience might search for. See Install and explore SEO Tools for where the field appears.

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a list of all pages on your site, with links, for search engines to crawl and index. The Simple XML Sitemap settings in Drupal CMS control how your sitemap is generated and updated; Submit your site to search engines covers the configuration.

Structured data and Schema.org

Schema.org provides a shared vocabulary that search engines use to understand your content better. Adding Schema.org markup, also called structured data, helps search engines display rich results, like star ratings, event dates, or recipe details, directly in search listings. This can improve visibility and click-through rates.

The Schema Metatag module works alongside the Metatag module to add structured data to your site as JSON-LD, a format recommended by search engines. You meet both in the SEO Checklist, which walks you through adding structured data that follows Schema.org recommendations; see Meta tags.

URL aliases and clean URLs

URL aliases, also known as clean URLs, are web addresses that contain keywords describing the content of the page. They are friendlier to both users and search engines because those keywords can match the words people search with:

• SEO-friendly URL: yoursite.com/easy-vegan-recipes
• Generic URL: yoursite.com/node/14258

Drupal CMS creates clean URLs for you automatically, based on the title of your content. When a URL alias is updated, Drupal CMS creates a redirect from the old alias to the current one, so existing links keep working.

Where to go next

• Install and explore SEO Tools adds the modules these terms refer to.
• Work through the SEO checklist turns these ideas into a to-do list.
• Tags and analytics explains how to measure the visitors your SEO work brings in.