Tagging for SEO in Drupal

Posted Aug 12, 2008 // 17 comments

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic in online publishing, and has been for some time. This is because you can greatly improve the reach of your content and your traffic numbers by following simple rules that make content easily understood by search engines. At this point, many web publishers have mastered the basics of SEO . most already understand the importance of clean URLs and page title But what about lesser-known tricks of the trade?Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic in online publishing, and has been for some time.

This is because you can greatly improve the reach of your content and your traffic numbers by following simple rules that make content easily understood by search engines. At this point,many web publishers have mastered the basics of SEO . most already understand the importance of clean URLs and page title

But what about lesser-known tricks of the trade?

Here is a little secret: the way you tag your content can have significant impact on the search-engine visibility and ranking of your website. Drupal is especially well-positioned in this regard, since it has advanced tagging and tag visualization features (e.g. tag clouds). Every tag attached to a content item leads to a “Tag Page” that is a natural “landing page” for keywords. Since these tags are links, they are eagerly followed by search crawler bots. And the tag landing pages are indexed frequently.

Ok but, where’s this secret formula?

Here: always try to use specific, two- or three-word tags!. Let me repeat this: avoid generic, single-word tags! The human brain tends to be parsimonious. As such, when we think of information we unconsciously try to describe it with several one-word keywords. Well we are beginning to see that is not particularly effective for search engines.

If you have managed Google AdWords campaigns, you know that buying single-word keywords is a waste of money. They are too generic, expensive and cost-per-conversion is much higher than if you buy well-targeted two- or three-word keyword phrases. For instance, it’s much better to use something like “driver safety” than just “cars” as a keyword. You never want to buy a single-word keyword like “cars” for your Google campaign.

Well, then – why do you tag you content with single-word term “cars”? Tag pages are natural landing pages for search engines, so the optimization rules that apply to search keywords are directly transferable to rules for tags in your tag cloud.

In some of the other content-management systems, publishers have to manually create “landing pages” for the search keywords they run campaigns for. In Drupal we get those out-of-the-box in the form of tag pages… only we need to treat these tags as the target search keywords for search engines. If you do, you will see the difference in a short time.

Happy hunting.