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Drupal and SEO - The Nodewords (aka the Meta Tags) Module

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The nodewords module allows you easily set the meta tags on your site.  Some features of this module are (quoted directly out of the documentation):

  • The current supported meta tags are ABSTRACT, CANONICAL, COPYRIGHT, GEO.POSITION, DESCRIPTION, ICBM, KEYWORDS, PICS-LABEL, REVISIT-AFTER, ROBOTS and the site verification meta tags used by Google Webmaster Tools, Microsoft Bing Webmaster Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer.
  • You can tell "nodewords" to add all terms of some specified vocabularies to the KEYWORDS meta tag.
  • You can specify a default meta tag ROBOTS value to use for all pages. You can override it on each page.
  • On taxonomy pages, the term description is used as the DESCRIPTION tag. The term itself is added to the list of KEYWORDS. You can override the description to use if you wish.
  • You can seperately specify the meta tags to show on some specific pages of your site (in example, the front page, the error 403 page, the error 404 page, the tracker page), or to use in specific situations (in example, when the site is offline).
  • The support for Views, and Panels has been removed from Nodewords 6.x-1.x on August 15, 2009; successive versions for Drupal 6 replaced it with a more generic support for third-party module pages.
  • You can select which of these tags you want to output on each page. You can also remove the edit box for these tags from the node edit page if you don't like using it.
  • All text of the DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS meta tags are added to the search system so they are searchable too; other meta tags could be added to the search system too (depending on the code implemented from the module).

So basically, nodewords does a lot of stuff, most of which you may not ever use (i know I don't use a lot of it), but its nice to know the functionality is there just in case you start using it.

How I use it

Many of different meta tags out there are often ignored or influence your SERP rankings very little.  As such I don't worry about most of them.  On every page I use mainly KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.

I spend maybe 10 seconds on the keywords tag and spend a good amount of time on the description meta tag (if I remember to do it).  I will also do a robots = noindex for pages that are used as thank you pages for newsletter sign-ups or just pages that I really dont want/need on the search engines.  Other than that, I really dont use much else... maybe canonical url tags but I try to setup drupal so I don't have a lot of duplicate content to worry about.

The Keywords tag - These don't really have much pull any more since they can be abused so easily.  They are also easy for the competition to very simply check what you have in the tag.  I used it because I believe it is still considered by search engines but I don't put in my exact keywords I might be trying to target.  If I'm targeting "dog training for fat dogs" I would put in "fat, dog, training"... something like that.

The Description tag - This is very important.  Maybe not so much for SEO (search engines still consider it though) but for selling your link.  If you have a 2nd or 3rd place spot for a search term, but your description is just a bunch random of text automatically pulled from the page ... you're going to loose clicks.  Keep this less than about 150 characters

The description tag should contain the keywords your trying to target, but feel like a normal description of your content.  It should try to pull in people from the SERPs.

The

This is used with, yep, you guessed it, google webmaster tools (shocker hu...).  I only add my verification code to the front page.  Seems kinda silly to be able to add the code to every page... but whatever.

Settings Tab

Other than that, I only other things I have set are:

With those settings, you should get a collapsable meta tags settings for each node on your site.  That way you can set each and every node (wooohoo.. that will be fun if you have several thousand nodes to do).

Default and Specific Meta Tags Tab

Under this tab, I basically only set the frontpage meta tags and meta tags for any views I have (via "other pages").

I do not use the "Default Values" as I want everything to be different, and this also forces me to do it right and fill it out.

There you have it.  Nodewords does a pretty good job and makes it easy to add meta tags to each page.  It is a vital tool for doing SEO with drupal.

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