Some content management systems have a reputation for poor search engine performance. Drupal, thankfully, is not one of these. With a combination of core functionality and several contributed modules, any Drupal web-site can have very good search engine performance.
URLs
Drupal has the capacity to assign “human friendly URLs” to any page on the web-site. With the addition of the Pathauto module, we can configure the site to automatically generate “friendly” URLs based on the titles, dates, categories, menu hierarchy, or nearly any other property of a piece of content.
The Global Redirect and Pathologic modules can ensure that search engines and visitors use only the “friendly” URL for a page, reducing or removing the instance of duplicate content.
Search Engine Integration
The RobotsTxt, XML Sitemap and Site Verification modules can help to support and manage the integration between a Drupal site and various search engines.
Metadata
The Metatag module allows your Drupal site to manage the metatags embedded in the code of each page. As with “friendly” URLs, metatags can be controlled on each individual page or generated automatically from the title, dates, and other properties of each piece of content.
This module supports a range of metadata standards and formats including Dublin Core, Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards.
Analytics
The Google Analytics and Google Analytics Reports modules can integrate support for Google Analytics more deeply into a Drupal web-site. Using these modules we have fine-grained control of which users and which sections of a site are tracked and even embed Google Analytics reports directly into the site.
Content
A Drupal web-site can enforce a range of restrictions and requirements on the content that it manages.
Common concerns are alternate text for images (often called “alt text”), resizing uploaded images appropriately, restricting formats of uploaded files, enforcing length requirements.
Domain-specific requirements can also be implemented, if required.
Markup
The code generated by a Drupal web-site can be customised, as required, to meet the requirements of a project.
The Drupal theme which implements your custom design will meet search engine recommendations out of the box, and can be customised to meet SEO requirements if required.
Performance
Drupal includes a range of features and considerations which help to improve page loading times, now an important component of search engine rankings. This includes the aggregation of Javascript and stylesheet files, content delivery networks, and a range of application caching solutions.
Drupal web-sites can, depending on specific functionality, have very good support for HTTP caching and a range of server configuration options which can improve performance.