Drupal has a number of contributed modules available to enhance its built in SEO features. By adding and combining the features mentioned below, you can be assured that your web presence will compete well for attention from Google and other search engines. It's important to get some of these modules installed and running early on as not all of them work retrospectively on existing content.

Google analytics

The Google analytics module provides fine grained control over how analytics is implemented on your site. While adding analytics to your site is not in itself something that contributes or enhances your SEO, analytics provides a lot of information that can be used to improve site content.

It's also quite good fun to be able to track how many people are visiting your site, where they're from and how they're navigating pages. Knowing all this information helps you to tailor your content, or rework it if it's not having the desired effect. By making intelligent modifications or additions to your site's content, you are helping to improve its SEO profile.

Path auto

The Path auto module is a must have. As we saw in a previous post, Google takes into account the words contained in the URL of a webpage when ranking and presenting it in results. By default, Drupal uses a node ID to name URLs, so pages in your site are found at paths like this node/23 or node/56.

Obviously, its impossible for anyone to deduce what the content of a given page is about just by looking at the default URLs - and since the URL is presented in search result, it's silly not to give pages meaningful names. Path auto will generate a URL (most often from the title of the page itself), but it also depends on the Token module to provide you with a huge range of different options.

Nodewords

Nodewords is another must have module. This can be used to create meaningful meta descriptions of a webpage. Since meta descriptions are often presented in search results, it is hugely important to have something meaningful to human eyes here. Without a good meta description, Google will pick what it thinks is most pertinent and this cedes control to a computer - why not take charge yourself and show exactly what you want?

Nodewords, is a module you'll need to install right from the start because after building up 6 months worth of content, it can be a pain to go back through all posts and re-save in order to have Nodewords generate a meta description for them.

Aside from these big three, there are a number of other modules worth checking out:

• XML Sitemap
• SEO Friend
• Pathologic

Remember, its always best to consider your site's SEO strategy early on and implement any and all features right from the start. This will give you the best possible chances of gaining traction in a hugely competetive market.