When I was writing documentation for Drupal CMS’s SEO Tools recommended add-on (aka “recipe”), I realized that not all Drupal site users may be up-to-date on the essentials of SEO and how Drupal can help you make your site discoverable by your target audiences.
While Drupal has long been a solid foundation for building search-friendly websites — that doesn’t mean every Drupal user knows where to start with SEO.
In this post, I’ll define some essential SEO concepts and highlight some best practices direct from the Drupal CMS documentation I wrote about in the guide, Promoting your content with SEO.
Whether you’re configuring a custom Drupal 11 site or using Drupal CMS, these tips apply to you. All of the tools mentioned below may be installed on any Drupal 11 site or installed via the SEO Tools recommended add-on in Drupal CMS.
What is SEO (and why should Drupal users care)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of helping search engines understand what your website is about so that your content can be discovered by your intended audience.
Good SEO helps:
- Make your content easier to find
- Improve how your site appears in search results
- Support your business or community goals
Drupal gives you everything you need to build a well-structured, SEO-friendly site. But it’s up to you and your team to configure those tools and use them well. As with all things website-related, success will depend on a combination of the right tools implemented by people who use them with purpose, test the results, and make adjustments as needed.
Let’s talk about some core SEO principles that Drupal supports out of the box or with widely-used contributed modules.
Clear page titles and smart use of meta tags
Search engines use your page title and description to determine relevance — and so do your site visitors.
Meta tags are special HTML tags that describe the content of a web page. Search engines use metadata – information about a page or site – contained in meta tags to categorize and rank content in their result displays.
Examples of meta tags:
- The page title, a clickable headline shown in search results, is contained in the title meta tag. For example:
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<title>SEO for Drupal Users: What You Need to Know | Drupalize.Me</title>
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- The description, a short, engaging summary that appears under the title on search results pages, is contained in the meta description tag. For example:
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<meta name="description" content="In this post, we’ll define essential SEO concepts and highlight best practices direct from the documentation we wrote about promoting your site with SEO for the Drupal CMS User Guide.">
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Social Media Tags define which images or descriptions social platforms should use when people share your page. Open Graph (prefixed with
og:) and Twitter (prefixed withtwitter:) meta tags are used by social media platforms to display previews of links shared on social media. For example:-
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Drupalize.Me">
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How do I add meta tags to my Drupal site?
Drupal already includes essential meta tags including the title and description. Other modules or themes may add or override meta tags and their values. Metatag module is the most popular module for adding and administrating meta tags to your site.
- When you download the Metatag module, you can add the types of meta tags you want to include in the HTML
<head>of your site’s pages by enabling the appropriate sub-modules. Filter your module list at Extend (/admin/modules) by “metatag” to find them. Metatag depends on the Token module, which enables a site administrator or builder to set up patterns using tokens for each metatag your site supports.
Install and Explore SEO Tools in Drupal CMS to learn more.
composer require drupal/metatag
- In Drupal 11, with a little configuration, you can create default patterns and override them when needed.
Use structured headings (H1, H2, H3) with meaningful text
The point of using structured headings is for users, algorithms, and accessibility devices to quickly be able to understand what a page is about through its outline. An outline is derived from the title and headings on the page. If you were to read just the headings on an important page on your site, would you be able to tell what it was about? Do the focus keywords that people use to search for content or services that you provide appear in your page’s title or headings?
A sensible orderly structure not only benefits your site’s SEO but makes it more accessible to users visiting your site using screen readers and other accessibility devices. A win-win!
- It’s up to content editors using tools like Drupal’s CKEditor 5 to use proper heading levels to give content structure. (As opposed to using “bold” formatting on sub-headings within content fields, for example.) And it’s up to content editors to choose the appropriate content type for their content, to ensure consistent display and proper placement within the site’s menu and structure.
- It’s up to site builders or developers to design and build content types with fields that support consistent display and data entry of content. Instead of relying solely on content editors to enter content consistently when given only “Body” fields or content types that are too generic.
- It’s up to theme developers or site builders to display fields for each content type appropriately through designing the HTML in content and page templates or by using the numerous options for controlling layout for content (like Layout Builder, Views, Display modes — and the much anticipated, currently in development for both Drupal CMS and Drupal: Experience Builder).
- 💡Tip: Install the Real-time SEO for Drupal module. The module will check to see if your “focus keyword” appears in any headings.
Use URL aliases to create keyword-rich web addresses
Human-friendly URLs are SEO-friendly URLs. Clean URLs improve user experience and SEO. When you create or edit content, use the URL alias field to manually set a URL alias or clean URL. To automate this step, install the absolutely essential Pathauto module.
Pathauto lets you define automatic URL patterns for different content types. Once set up, every new page, article, or event gets a clean URL — no manual input required. For example:
- A blog post titled “My Summer Trip to the Oregon Coast” could automatically get the URL
/blog/my-summer-trip-oregon-coast. - You can create patterns per content type using any URL-safe text, numbers, or special characters (like slashes or hyphens) to create structure in your URLs. For example:
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/news/[node:title]for news articles -
/events/[node:created:custom:Y-m]/[node:title]for events
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Drupal CMS includes Pathauto by default via the SEO Tools recipe, but you can also install and configure it on any Drupal 11 site using: composer require drupal/pathauto.
What about keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines when looking for content. The good news is that you no longer need to worry about stuffing keywords into meta tags—a practice that was once common, but is now outdated and discouraged.
- It’s up to content editors to create engaging, well-structured content that authentically includes the topic and words your visitors would use when searching.
- 💡Tip: Use the Real-time SEO for Drupal module to help content editors evaluate content as they edit. It will check to see if your “focus keyword” appears in any headings.
Drupal and Drupal CMS help you focus on something far more important: creating engaging, well-structured content that naturally includes the topic and words that your visitors actually use when searching.
What else should I do help my site’s SEO?
Turns out, there’s a LOT you can do to ensure your site is ready to be found by your future customers, users, or visitors. But how do you keep track of what you’ve done or what someone on your team has done, whether that’s installing a module, configuring it, setting up a third-party accounts with Google and Bing — so much to do! Enter SEO Checklist module.
comprehensive documentation on every action item in the SEO Checklist.
Depending on your site’s team — which may consist of just you, or may include other developers, marketing experts, or content editors — you’ll need a variety of skills and permissions to complete every recommended action in the SEO Checklist, including:
- Installing a module using Composer or by installing a recipe (recommended add-on) in Drupal 11 or Drupal CMS
- Administrative permission to configure certain modules
- Organizational permission to set up and use Google and Bing accounts and services, such as Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Whether you’re using SEO Checklist in a regular Drupal site or in Drupal CMS, this extensive documentation in the Drupal CMS User Guide will help you confidently use the SEO Checklist to optimize your site for search engines.
Short on time? Drupal CMS gives you a head start with SEO
As you may know, Drupal CMS is a curated package built on top of Drupal 11 that includes helpful recommended add-ons (also known as recipes) which are pre-configured bundles of modules and settings.
One of those is the SEO Tools add-on, which installs and configures the following modules:
- Real-time SEO (content analysis while editing)
- Simple XML Sitemap
- SEO Checklist
- Metatag + Pathauto with smart defaults
This setup gives you a quick way to get started with SEO best practices — especially if you’re not sure which modules to choose. Installing Drupal CMS is also great way to try out these modules to see if you want to add them to your regular Drupal site.
Not using Drupal CMS? You can still install the SEO Tools recipe!
If you’re working on a regular Drupal 11 site, you can install the same tools using the SEO Tools Recipe:
drupal/drupal_cms_seo_tools
Learn more about promoting your content with Drupal
While the following documentation guide was written for Drupal CMS, what is Drupal CMS but a pre-configured jumpstart of Drupal 11 plus recipes? Whatever your role or history with Drupal, take a fresh look at the SEO Tools in Drupal CMS. Who knows, you might learn something new about optimizing your Drupal site for search engines.
Learn so much more in the Drupal CMS User Guide’s Promote your content with SEO documentation.
Happy search-engine optimizing! Let us know in the comments your favorite SEO strategies for Drupal sites.
