Drupal is a free modular content management framework, content management system and blogging engine. Today, it is used by many high-traffic websites, including The Onion, Spread Firefox, Ourmedia, KernelTrap, and the Defective by Design campaign. It is particularly popular for building online communities.With a few modifications it can be configured for excellent on-site search engine optimization.

These are a few basic tips that can help you to optimize your drupal website for most of the search engines.

• Drupal and Clean URLs –> You can find this option in administer > settings > General settings. Clean URLs are important and are necessary for the pathauto module
• Pathauto module –> The pathauto module is highly recommended for new drupal websites(Please do no use this module for any old websites because it will change existing URLs and then the search engines will no longer be able to find those pages.). It makes nice customized URLs based on things like title, taxonomy, and username. You also have to enable the path module for pathauto to work.Think carefully about how you want your URLs to look. It takes some experience with Drupal to get the exact URL paths that you might want. The URLs are controlled by a combination of taxonomy and pathauto. You can also use the path module to write custom URLs for each page, but that might become tedious and inconsistent on a large site.However, at least enable the path module and install the pathauto module. It will generate nice-looking URLs for you without much configuration.
• Nodewords module –> The meta description must be different on every page. The meta description should be one or two brief sentences to summarize the page. It should be written for your human visitors, but it is not a bad idea to tastefully and sparingly insert a couple of your keywords. Often when a search engine lists your site in the search engine results pages, it will use your page’s HTML title for the title, and your meta description for the text snippet. That is why the meta description should be written with human visitors in mind. You can configure the Drupal Nodewords module to output the meta description and meta keywords on every page.
• gsitemap module –> It will create a Google XML sitemap at http://www.example.com/gsitemap. I usually make a URL alias for that so that the sitemap can be found at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml instead. You can create URL aliases at admin > url aliases.

All these modifications will really help, and improve your site’s ranking in search engines. I will come with more tips for SEO in Drupal websites, so keep reading….