Okay, so I don't normally review books. I was approached and asked to review this Drupal book and I couldn't turn it down. Without a doubt, search engine optimization is a big factor to the fail or success of a website these days and some companies pay big money to get that no.1 ranking in Google. As a developer, it couldn't hurt to learn a little more about the subject and have it in mind when developing for clients.
I was a bit skeptical as to what a Drupal SEO book could do for me. But as I started reading it I realised it covered more than just SEO, it starts from the basics, gets you to install drupal, learn about modules and installing them as well as configuring specific modules. This is great as often that is the biggest flaws of Drupal contrib modules - they lack information on how to correctly configure them for you.
Firstly, this book assumes you're a bit of a n00b. It doesn't matter whether you're a Drupal developer, business owner, drupal enthusiast or a first time web user. You can use this book. The book explains everything in full detail and doesn't leave anything out. For 80% of people that is ideal. I found myself skimming over quite a few of the pages, and I bet I missed a few important things. But hey, you can satisfy everyone.
Overrall, its a pretty decent book. It showed me a few modules I didn't know existed such as redirects and a bunch of other search engine focused modules and brought attention to a lot of things SEO releated. Its doesn't advertise black SEO which is always good.
It does however, introduce a whole bunch more modules to a generally overcrowded drupal install. With every module added to a Drupal installation, the perfomance of Drupal decreases. Its not really the fault of SEO in Drupal but I am making a point that maybe some collaboration should be done there.
So as promised, my review is done. Ii'll now do my part for the SEO of this book and link to where you can buy it.
Hey Josh Yes, Drupal SEO can
Hey Josh
Yes, Drupal SEO can be tricky with the number of modules that need to be implemented to get the right structure, I have been toying with the idea of incorporating many of them into a single module, call it All-in-one-SEO for Drupal (after the Wordpress plugin), but that takes care of the basic SEO requirements that should be fundamental:
Page Title
Page Title by Path (Crucial when using Views and other module-generated pages)
Meta Tags/Node Words (has a little way to go before being perfectly suited)
Global Redirect
Path Redirect
Pathauto
XML Sitemap
Obviously there are others such as the Google Analytics module, but not everyone uses that for tracking so it should still be separate.
Ideally many of these elements should become part of core, including Menu Attributes which should, in my opinion, already be there to allow for not only SEO but also accessibility and proper XHTML strict markup (rel="new" to open in a new window using JS, for example).
Thanks for the review, Josh!
Thanks for the review, Josh! I really appreciate it. Yes, there are a lot of modules and that can hurt performance. However, most of the modules I recommend are very efficient and, if they're not, Volacci usually funds rewrites to get them there. We did this with the XML Sitemap module recently to excellent result...or at least progress. :-)
I do recommend that people use robust servers and turn on caching (see p.159). We recently upgraded to a dedicated server an our rankings improved. Speed is very important and there are also a lot of other things that you can do to make Drupal fly, even with a lot of modules installed. There are some experts who have written about this topic in detail. Take a look here: budurl.com/fastdrupal That's pretty old but there's still good information there.
David, I'm not sure it would be a great idea to make a single module to do all the SEO you're talking about. With separate modules you can always count on the developers to know more about their one area of expertise. If there was just one module and that guy got busy then it make take awhile to get needed updates. Maybe a bundle of modules? Ie. Install this one bundle and all the modules you need would be there. That would be cool.
Cheers!
Thanks for the article. I
Thanks for the article. I have plan to fix my website http://www.minilibra.com to meet SEO friendly..
Its SEO comments like this
Its SEO comments like this that annoy me, very little content to the comment but post links to there site. Using my trusted site and a resource to boost themselves up. :( stink.
Great article ,,especially on
Great article ,,especially on redirects
Thanks Ben for the good
Thanks Ben for the good advice and your review
Drupal rocks - nice tutorial
Drupal rocks - nice tutorial here on how to get the basics out of Drupal.
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