**Update, May 28, 2010 (see info below regarding Nodewords)

Drupal is a fantastic platform for developing scalable web sites.  I recently switched from developing most of my web sites in Joomla to Drupal.  As to the reasons why, I’ll save that for another blog post. Once I switched over to Drupal I was keenly interested in finding out the best way to optimize it for good SEO best practices.

Here is what I have learned to date:

Enable Clean URLs

You will need to have Apache mod_rewrite enabled for this to work and ideally on a Linux server. 

So a typical url like this:

/?q=node/61 will become: /node/61

Well that’s nice but still not ideal as it's not very descriptive.You will see below that a nice little module called "Pathauto" will fix this.

Pathauto

With Pathauto, we can take a URL like: /node/61 and turn it into something meaningful and more descriptive. Not only does pathauto allow you to rename URLs but it also allows you to create a complex and relevant automated way of rendering and saving URLs on the fly as you create and save content in Drupal.

With Pathauto  "/node/61" will transform into : "/blog/the-name-of-your-post"

Note in Drupal 6 that when logged in as an admin to manage Pathauto settings and URLs, you need to look for a menu item called "URL aliases." under Site Building.

Page Title

The Drupal Page Title module gives ultimate in customization in regard to page titles for best SEO practices. The basic premise is that you can have unsurpassable control over your page titles and with that I mean the actual <title> tag that renders in the top bar of your browser and that is also seen in Google or Bing search results.

Google Analytics

There is a nice Google Analytics module for Drupal that goes way beyond just cutting and pasting your GA code into the footer of the page. The Drupal GA module gives you tons of control over what gets analyzed, selectively track certain roles and users, exclude logged in admins and you can also exclude admin pages. 

Nodewords

Nodewords allows you to set custom meta tags for individual content in Drupal. This is invaluable for best SEO practices.

Simple Meta

Note, as of May, 2010, we can no longer recommend nodewords, we have had nothing but problems with this module recently and it appears that there are no quick fixes in site. We have filed tickets in the issue cue but with no luck in getting our particular issue fixed, specifically meta tags for custom paths such as views. In favor of this we now recommend Simple Meta.  It has far less  bloat than nodewords and does what it is supposed to do and is great for custom paths.   

Resources:

Clean URLs: http://drupal.org/node/54832

Pathuto: http://drupal.org/project/pathauto

Page Title: http://drupal.org/project/page_title

Nodewords: http://drupal.org/project/nodewords

Simple Meta: http://drupal.org/project/simplemeta

Google Analytics: http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics