Top 6 SEO Modules for Drupal 8

Top 6 SEO modules for Drupal 8
Development Drupal

SEO is an integral part of any website. The same holds true for Drupal as well. Fortunately, due to Drupal’s prolific community and consequently module-rich nature, getting started on SEO with it is somewhat easier as there are loads of SEO modules available for it. 

However, sifting through loads of modules can get overwhelming, and this is why I’m going to help you out by highlighting the ones our team has found the most useful. 

 

Drupal SEO Checklist

First up on our list, we’ve got the Drupal SEO Checklist module; an all-in-one SEO dashboard that checks if your site is optimized for search engines and gives you an overview of various SEO functions for the site. 

Apart from that, it also breaks down the SEO tasks for you, recommends various SEO modules that further improve functionality and even keeps track of what has already been done with a date and time stamp. If you like to keep things organized, then the SEO Checklist is a must-have for you!

SEO Checklist

 

Pathauto

Pathauto is an immensely useful module that most Drupal developers swear by. Where SEO is concerned, having proper URLs to a site’s pages is essential if you want your content to rank high on SERPs. 

By using Pathauto, the need to manually create proper URLs for each new node is eliminated. Instead, the module automatically generates URLs based on specific set patterns that can be customized by the user. The URLs thus generated are concise and structured in the way that the user wants. As such, the Pathauto module is a really simple solution that can do wonders for your SEO.

Pathauto module

 

Redirect

Imagine a situation where you make a change to an article, which also means changing the context of the URL. The thing is, that URL is already ranked on search engines - this means that if any user were to click on the ranked URL, they would be directed to a link that is no longer available

Very likely, this would cause the user to leave your site and look elsewhere for the desired information, resulting in a detriment to your site's SEO ranking. With the Redirect module, you can easily redirect the users to the new URL. This contributes greatly towards your SEO efforts as it eliminates dead links from your site.

Redirect module

 

XML Sitemap & Simple XML Sitemap

A website’s XML sitemap is like the directory of that website. In it is defined the website’s structure, such as its URLs and the relationships between them. This makes it easier for Google’s search engine bots to crawl through such directories and hence rank them. It is highly recommended that you create a sitemap for your site in order to boost its SEO ranking.

The XML sitemap and the Simple XML sitemap modules for Drupal create such a sitemap for your Drupal site. The major difference between these two modules is that the latter was made specifically for Drupal 8; see this post for more differences between the two.

XML sitemap module

Simple XML sitemap module

 

Metatag

The Metatag module gives you the ability to provide more metadata to your website. This includes tags, page titles, descriptions etc. Google’s search engine uses this metadata to rank the website in search engine results.

While Drupal natively doesn’t allow editable meta tags fields, all of that can be done with the Metatag module. Using this module, the user can set meta tags for users, taxonomy, nodes, views etc. 

A new release of the module was made just a few days ago, resolving the issues described in SA-CORE-2019-003.

Metatag module

 

Google Analytics

While not a SEO module in and of itself, Google Analytics is a powerful tool for all aspects of a website. It helps you with monitoring traffic and keeping tabs on an extensive analysis of your site

Whenever you perform SEO-related changes to your site, you might be curious to see what results it yields. Using the Google Analytics module for Drupal, you can integrate your Drupal site with Google Analytics and find out what results your practices bring about. 

Google Analytics

 

Conclusion

There you have it - some of the most useful modules for Drupal 8 which encompass a wide variety of SEO actions. These are also the most accessible modules for anyone wanting to get started on optimizing their Drupal site for search engines. We hope you make good use of them and succeed in upping your website’s SEO game!

 

Improve your SEO strategy

 

Are you struggling with your Drupal site’s SEO? Need a helping hand? Contact us at Agiledrop - our extensive experience of working with Drupal enables us to provide top-notch Drupal services to our clients.