SEO Checklist

Today has been pretty productive in regards to the SEO checklist. I spent many hours on this today. Here is what I have done.

1. Install Administration menu module – Easy choice.
   
2. Install Elements module. – No. Don’t believe I’ll need it at this point.
3. Install Security Review module – Security is good. installed
4. Install Module Filter module – Should be core.
5. Configure Page Title module – Doing this instead of Meta tags.
6. Google/Bing stuff – Do it all. Including the analytics stuff. Why not? I’ve had Google and Live IDs for years now anyway.
7. Install Context Keywords module – not but sounds really cool. Present differnet options based on what they searched for.
8. Install Meta tags – No.
9. Install Scheduler module – Easy choice.
10.  Install HTML Purifier module. – Not enough people use it yet.
11. Install Search 404 module – Yes. Cool mod.
12. Install SEO Compliance Checker module – No
13. Install Read More Link module – No
14. Validate and check broken links – don’t have enough content to do this now. Will do it later.
15. Submit site to search engines – Bing and Google.  I didn’t have to do this in all the ways that the modules do. I have access to the html root so I just uploaded the verification file myself.
16. Install AddThis module – only one that i went with for Social Media. There are several choices. I believe this one to be the best.

Read all that you can on this stuff. the list is great but you need to be educated on the subject to do it properly.

Tomorrow, I configure Mollom. I’ve done it before and it isn’t too bad.

SEO Modules for Production

This references my post – Production Change Request – Modules for SEO.

I am now installing and enabling choice modules for SEO. Some of the big issues that I have read about concern path redirection, aliasing and multilingual capability. So I am going to avoid pathauto and global redirect and others that are similar. There also is a warning about using the Title Module and Meta Tags together as they do some of the same things. Buyer beware.

SEO is important of course, but since I’m aiming at a niche market so to speak, it isn’t so critical that I “beat” the competition in page rankings as it would be in other industries. Do your research and check out all the great SEO sites available out there to customize a plan for yourself. Will add to this post in a bit.

Beginning a Blog in Drupal 7

I have been meaning to post this for the longest time and have kept forgetting it. This site is a great resource for Drupal and one that I found pretty useful when I was first starting out. And useful today too.

Learn By the Drop – Check these folks out. They published the pdf that I have linked that will walk you through your first blog, custom content creation and more. Worth reading if you are new to Drupal, or even of moderate experience, like I hope to be one day! 😉

Take a look. Here is the link to the PDF: Build your blog.

More SEO for tomorrow

Well, I didn’t get as much done today as I would have liked. Seems to be that way a lot. Aim high I suppose.

Tomorrow I will be finishing up the SEO stuff. Installing the modules on Prod, configing. And adding the info from Google and Bing. Those are some of the real keys. But…

The number one key is content. Make sure that you have something to say, that it is relevant and informative. I never expected this blog to be anything more than a sounding board for my ideas on what to do with Drupal. And while it has succeeded there, it has also attracted some attention. Which, I would like to thank those folk for. That in itself has helped me hone out some of my ideas.