Ben Finklea from Volacci presented SEO optimization for Drupal 6. These are my notes from the presentation. Below that are several videos from his presentation.

Ben started out by underlining that anyone can do Drupal SEO. There are plenty of good modules that you can use to help. There are videos and books that can also help you create a rocking SEO plan.

10 reasons that Drupal is the best platform for SEO

1) Configurable
2) Flexible
3) Stays optimized
4) No duplicate content
5) Clean code
6) Easy to integrate with 3rd party SEO services
7) Fights Spam
8) Allows for landing pages
9) Community Features
10) Thriving Ecosystem

7 Tips to rock your Drupal SEO

1) There are no secret tips
2) Optimize for one or two keywords per page
3) Rule of the upper left corner - what is in the upper left corner is the most important.
4) If you can't see it, neither can Google
5) Track everything - if you don't know what people are doing on your site, you will find it difficult to tweak your SEO plans
6) Content is king-like. More like a Queen..or a powerful Bishop
7) Conversions are your primary goal

You can pick up a zip file of the following modules (at least for a few days) from http://d6-7.volacci.com/seomodules.zip

• global redirect
• Google Analytics
• html purifier
• mollom
• nodewords
• page title
• pathauto
• pathredirect
• scheduler
• search 404
• seo checklist
• NEW XML sitemap

Other Modules That Might be Helpful Include

• sitemap - plaintext
• menu attributes
• apache solr
• open calais

Other 3rd Party SEO Tools That Are Helpful

• Google analytics
• Google webmaster tools
• seo-browser.com
• w3c validators
• google adwords keyword tool
• crazy egg

There are new SEO practices and information in the last few months. Google is crawling javascript links now. Pagerank sculpting is dead, don't bother doing it. Video is the new "text" - treat video like you would images. Watch out for Microsoft Bing - the search engine is strong which means we need to rethink how we approach search.

WHAT IF I DO ALL THAT AND MY CLIENT IS STILL NOT MAKING MONEY ONLINE?

There are three plans to make money online - only one works.

Plan A: Build a website
Plan B: Build a website and get traffic
Plan C: Build a website and get traffic and design for conversion

Ben went on to doing some demonstrations. He started with the Checklist Module. Then went onto discussing how important the Page Title of a page is to Google and that custom page titles are essential for great SEO. Using the Page Title Module will help you with that. He then went onto discuss pathauto. He recommended that you also install the path redirect module and then ensure that you choose one of the options to redirect your old aliases. He also recommended that you install the Global Redirect module because not only does it redirect paths like node/878 but will also redirect the non-clean URL path. He recommends using the Google Analytics module rather than pasting code into the footer so you aren't tracking admin page hits or hits from within your company. Finally, he went on to explain that meta-tags aren't of particular help. However, the meta-description is very useful in improving your SEO rankings. Geo Metatagging can be helpful for search engines to know where you're located.

All in all, I thought Ben's presentation was clear and concise. I hope the videos below are of help to you.