Drupal SEO Best Practices for 2018: 8 Easy Steps to Take to Boost Your Google Ranking- Part 2

I am a woman of my word and so, as promised to you in yesterday's post, I'm back now with a handful of Drupal SEO best practices to follow this year.

Best practices, valuable tips & tricks and key Drupal SEO modules waiting for you to unlock their optimization power and “inject” it into your website...

All which, once put together, will give you a significant boost in (Google) ranking. So, shall we?
 

5. Build Your Keyword List, One of the Drupal SEO Best Practices to Stick to

So, you've given your links a “deep clean” (as seen in Part 1), turned on your Google Analytics “tracking” power and your Drupal SEO Checklist's engines, too. What next? 

Putting together your targeted keyword list!

And this is one of those Drupal SEO best practices that can either “turbocharge” or turn your entire site optimization strategy into worthless effort. That if you underestimate its “superpower”.

And here are the tools to rely on when you go “keyword hunting”:
 

Google Keyword Planner: 
 

• it shows the no. of searches for each potential keyword that you could rank for
• so you'll know whether it's worth adding it to your list or not, depending on the traffic that it can generate
   

Google Trends:
 

• it gives you an insight into how a specific keyword has “performed” over the years 
   

Moz:
 

• a whole SEO toolkit put at your disposal, including tools for keyword research, link building, site auditing, reporting, you name it...
   

WordTracker: 
 

• it puts a whole “ecosystem” of keyword-identifying tools at your disposal
   

6. From Lifeless Keywords to "Living", Keyword-Optimized Content

Now it's time to sprinkle your keywords across your website. And not just anyhow, but... strategically!

Your “battle plan” should include the following content optimization steps:
 

1. create (if there isn't one already) one page for each target keyword 
2. consider removing certain keywords from your list before designing new keyword-optimized pages; some keywords may just not be suitable for your particular business
3. write custom page descriptions, page-focused titles, add page-relevant keywords
4. … and make sure to optimize the content on each one of these targeted pages, pulling off a proper keyword density 
    

7. Add 2 More Essential Modules to your Drupal SEO Toolbox

2 Drupal 8 SEO modules, to be more specific: the RDF UI module and the Linkit module (available in Drupal 7, as well).
 

RDF (Resource Description Framework) UI:
 

• it's built, from the ground up, with the idea of empowering you to (seamlessly) integrate Schema.org with your Drupal site (whether during or after the development process)
• … another one of those Drupal SEO best practices with a clear impact on your Google ranking
• with this on-page markup “on”, it will be fairly easier for search engines to “understand” what each page on your site is about
• … and thus deliver richer search results
   

Linkit:
 

• it “spoils” you (or I'd better say your content team), with a convenient UI for easily setting up links right in the WYSIWYG, using the autocomplete field
• it sees that they're properly formatted, that they use the right path and that they're up to date, as well
   

8. "Fast" Is Just Another Word for "Optimized"

As fast as your budget allows! Fast-loading pages will:
 

1. have a huge impact on the overall user experience
2. “please” the search engines and signal them that your site's optimized for speed and thus for enhancing UX
3. and implicitly give you the boost in rankings (the reason why you've put together this whole Drupal SEO strategy in the first place, right?)
    

From the dozens of techniques, tools & modules at your disposal, that you can leverage for optimizing your website for high speed, I outline just one: the Google AMP module.

Integrating it with your Drupal site you'll be killing two birds with one stone:
 

1. you'll give your site a massive performance boost
2. you'll make it mobile-responsive 
    

A Note of Caution as a Conclusion

Focusing on your links and forgetting all about the right keyword density across your site's content. Or injecting high speed into your website and forgetting to setup Google Analytics for your website. 

Or undermining the meta tags' critical role and focusing exclusively on building your target keyword list, won't give you that boost in ranking that you're aiming at.

Make them ALL work together!

Take these 8 Drupal SEO best practices as a clock mechanism: in vain do 7 parts get all your attention. If you neglect just the 8th component, the whole mechanism/SEO strategy won't work /won't give your site that boost in ranking that you're expecting.