"Link sculpting" (also know as "pagerank sculpting" or "link juice flow optimization") is one of the more recent and popular trends in search engine optimization. Although some people have been using this concept for years, it has entered the SEO mainstream over the past year or so.

Older versions of drupal used the h1 tag for the site logo and h2 tag for the page title. Since h1 is one of the most important tags for SEO, the drupal community lobbied to get rid of the h1 for the logo and to change the h2 tag in the tag to an h1 tag. But, I have just noticed that there is a situation where Drupal has multiple h1 tags!

There are lots of search engine optimization tools available, so let's highlight some free SEO tools as well as some inexpensive ones.

I was checking out my Google Analytics statistics for kristen.org since I'm curious how people get to the site and what they are typing into the search engines. I was surprised to see that I actually get some traffic here from people typing in my name (kristen). Of course, my domain has kristen in it and my home page has it in the <title> tag, so the word does show up a bit. My site is actually in the top 20 in google for that keyword!

Google provides a free keyword research tool to easily see what keyword phrases are popular. The tool is here:

Are you wondering how to make Drupal SEO friendly? You can start by taking a look at the list of Drupal SEO modules that are available for free.

I setup Drupal on kristen.org a couple weeks ago. I intentionally set it up with the base installation and didn't add any 3rd party modules. The reason being that I set up this site to show how you can add in various Drupal modules and configure Drupal for SEO (search engine optimization).

I gave a Drupal SEO presentation at the recent BADCamp in Berkeley along with Jen Lampton of Chapter Three.

The point of this site is Drupal SEO and, yet, I haven't yet optimized a page for that term (although those individual words do show up in other node titles but not the exact phrase). So, this will be another experiment to see how high I can rank for that exact phrase.

If for some reason you must take down your site or just a few pages temporarily for maintenance, moving servers, or whatever reason, you need to tell the search engines that this is TEMPORARY. Otherwise, they will see the page is not there (404 status/response code) and drop your site or page from their search index.

These are good HTML validation tools to ensure your HTML is clean... clean HTML means better SEO (search engine optimization) and typically faster page loads.

I updated this website so I can explain some basic SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, particularly how you setup Drupal SEO. There are lots of websites that explain SEO, so I won't go into too much detail here... simply the very basics. Once I get into configuring Drupal for search engine optimization, more details will be filled in.

The Drupal path and pathauto modules are great, but also can cause us some problems. Google does not like it when more than one URL yields the same results. The path and pathauto modules allow us to create an alias for our content. So, instead of using "node/15" in our URL, we can use something more descriptive like "content/cool-seo-article".

The Drupal pathauto module is a great tool for giving your content names based on the content titles. For example, the title of this blog post (node) is "Drupal Pathauto Module" so once it is saved with an automatic alias, the URL alias will be "drupal-pathauto-module" which is much easier to remember than node/9.

There are a number of Drupal SEO modules to choose from. Here is a summary of the most popular ones to help with your Drupal search engine optimization.

This article discusses how to use the Drupal node teaser for better SEO. I have used the "split cursor at summary" feature and unchecked the "show summary in full view" checkbox in order to get the teaser you are reading to be different than the first part of the node body text.

The Drupal pathauto module is great but be careful how you configure it. The recommended settings are already chosen by default but let's review them below. To get to the Drupal pathauto URL aliases settings, go to: Administer > Site Building > URL Aliases (admin/build/path/pathauto).