There are several tools you can use to make your site easy for search engines to find and index. Here are a few things you can do to present your Drupal Gardens site in the best possible light for search engines.
SEO settings for your content
Drupal Gardens provides additional SEO settings for Professional subscription plans or higher with support for page titles, canonical URLs, keywords and meta tags, Open Graph Protocol, and robots directives.
To access these settings, enable the Meta Tags module (available on Professional subscription plans or higher). After the Meta Tags module is enabled, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) settings are located at the bottom of the form when you create or edit content.
You can specify the following optional settings using the list of tokens in the Available tokens section, such as the author name, title, and date. You can insert them automatically into the settings as needed.
- In the HTML page title settings section, enter the sites name and slogan, even if they are not displayed in your site’s theme.
- In the Meta tags section, create keywords that can influence how your site is found by search engines. Note that this is not supported by some search engines, like Google. You can also add key words that describe the content.
- In the Open graph section, add Open Graph meta tags to create "rich" social objects and help Facebook understand how to interpret the content.
- In the Advanced options section, provide search engines with specific directions for what to do when the page is indexed.
Once you are done, just click Publish.
Note: If you want to configure default meta tags for each content type, select Configuration > Meta Tags and fill out the tokens you want inserted into every page or content type as it is being created.
When you view your page source, you can see the meta tags and other SEO settings that you specified:
Learn about your vistors using Google analytics
Sign up for a Google Analytics account at http://www.google.com/analytics/ and enable the Goggle Analytics module to see statistics about your site, your visitors, and their activities while on your site. This can help you find your most effective keywords, see which pages interest your visitors the most, who is linking to you, and much more. To learn more, see Google Analytics or Using analytics variables.
Create better URLs with Pathauto
Drupal Gardens comes with the Pathauto module pre-installed and configured. This generates human-readable page URLs based on the titles of your content. For instance instead of a URL like http://example.drupalgardens.com/?q=node/1234, your post entitled "New product line release December 2010" will appear as http://example.drupalgardens.com/content/new-product-line-release-december-2010. As long as the titles you create are relevant to your content, they will help boost your search engine ranking and the likelihood someone will find your website. The pre-configured Pathauto settings that come with your Drupal Gardens site will not need to be changed in the majority of cases. If you need to, you can alter the configuration for all generated aliases, as well as for specific types of content, at Configuration > URL aliases > Automated alias settings.
Verify your site
Verify and/or authenticate that you own your site with various search engines. The Verifications module works with any search engine or web service that uses meta tag verification or a verification file, including Google, Bing, Yahoo!. Add one or more verifications at Configuration > Verifications.
Create an XML sitemap
Drupal Gardens sites come with the XML Sitemap module, a helpful and useful SEO tool to give search engines more insight into the structure and contents of your site. To learn more, see XML Sitemap.