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Pre-launch SEO checklist for Drupal sites: preparation for high rankings!

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Why is a pre-launch SEO checklist for Drupal sites necessary? Let’s see. When your Drupal website is freshly developed and well-tested, it looks like it is ready for a launch. But before you cut the ribbon and let your site fly to the World Wide Web, there is one more thing — what about SEO? You will never have a second chance to make a first impression on Google. So make sure the search giant loves your website from its first day online! How can you achieve this and never miss a thing? To this and other SEO questions, our digital agency experts are always happy to give the answers — and, of course, we can take full care of your SEO. For now, we are sharing with you our Drupal website SEO checklist.

Drupal websites and SEO-friendliness

Before we move on, we should mention that a Drupal website is a very lucky choice in terms of SEO. Compatibility with search engines is in Drupal’s DNA.

It is possible to make absolutely everything on Drupal websites to please Google — enable clean URLs, use the built-in strong taxonomy system for content categorization, create clear page titles, have a super clean HTML5 markup as of Drupal 8, and much more. Awesome Drupal modules exist for every purposes and to facilitate any tasks.

Pre-launch SEO checklist for Drupal sites

So now explore what needs to be done about SEO before your Drupal website is launched. Every question here is important and needs to be asked.

  • Is your website mobile responsive?

Website mobile-friendliness is one of Google’s ranking factors. One of the best ways to make your website display perfectly on mobile devices is responsive web design. Our front-end developers and UX designers are great at creating it.

  • Are unique and proper meta tags provided?

Metadata created with the right search engine optimization is very important for good search rankings. In Drupal, this is done with the Metatag module that can provide meta tags automatically based on patterns. This includes tags like meta description, title, canonical URL, and more. In addition, the module takes care of Open Graph and Twitter Card data tags that are responsible for your website’s display on social media.

  • Are SEO-friendly URLs for web pages in place?

Descriptive URLs are incredibly important for search engines. By default, however, Drupal pages have URls like “node/1”, which needs to be improved. Luckily, Drupal has an awesome module called the Pathauto, which can automatically provide of meaningful path aliases based on patterns.

SEO-friendly URLs for web pages

  • Are H1 tags unique and optimized?

The H1 tags are especially important, so they should be both user and SEO-friendly. This means unique and enriched with keywords.

  • Is internal linking present?

Internal linking lets your pages gain link value and helps Google understand the relationships between the pages. So your website will be better off with the correct internal linking.

  • Is the robots.txt file created?

Here is another important file for your website’s direct “communication” with the search engines. Robots.txt is just a small text file that informs the search crawlers and robots about which areas to crawl and which to not crawl.

  • Do your website’s images have the ALT tag?

It is incredibly important to let search engines know what your images are about. This is provided by the ALT tag for every image. If you are using Drupal 8, the ALT tag is by default obligatory for all images, so no image can be added without it. This is a requirement of web accessibility standards unless the administrator decides to change the settings.

ALT tag for all images

  • Is your website’s XML sitemap set up?

Search crawlers should understand your website’s structure from the start. That’s what XML sitemaps are useful for. This sitemap is a list of your website’s URLs with the information about their last update, the frequency of their change, and the weight in relation to each other. Drupal offers an XML Sitemap module that creates an XML sitemap for your website, as well as submit it to search engines.

  • Are the proper web page redirects provided?

Redirects are very helpful in case of broken links, users’ typos or alternate spellings for your web addresses, and more. So providing redirects is one of the more important points in the pre-launch Drupal website SEO checklist. The Drupal Redirect module helps you easily set up these redirects, as well as track the statistics of their work. For Drupal 7 websites, the Global Redirect module is also needed. 

web page redirects

  • Are 404 errors treated the right way?

Instead of showing your user just a 404 error for not found pages, it is a great practice to offer them a search within your website based on the URL. Why not use this awesome option if there is a ready Drupal mod for it — the Search 404? 

  • Is your website integrated with social media?

Social media integration is an additional huge help to link building and user engagement. Drupal has great social media modules for this like Easy Social, AddToAny Share Buttons, Social media share, Social Timeline, and plenty of others.

  • Is Google Analytics enabled for your website?

Google Analytics will give you priceless information about your users’ behaviour on your website that you can use to correct your campaigns. Drupal has a module for this — Google Analytics module. It helps you quickly and easily enable and configure Google Analytics for your website.

  • Is your website verification ready?

Another important step of the pre-launch Drupal website SEO checklist is site verification that tells Google the site really belongs to you. This improves the crawling processes. For Drupal websites, there is the Site verification module for this.

  • Is your website’s content unique and real?

During Drupal website development, dummy text “Lorem ipsum dolor” is often used instead of real text, which is added later. Be sure that dummy and test texts are replaced with real and unique content or simply cleaned up before your website goes live.

Have you called our Drupal agency?

This is the most important step in the pre-launch Drupal website SEO checklist, which alone can replace all the others ;)

To have a website perfectly prepared for getting on top of search results, contact our digital agency. It has both SEO and Drupal experts who work hand in hand for your best results!