I've added some content to this site, and now I want to make sure that this content is properly structured, tagged, and described in order for it to be found easily by search engines and searchers. This is a pretty good definition of SEO hygiene - the technical tricks and content practices that make your content findable.

But guess what? Out of the box, Drupal is missing some key functionality. A little useless to have a website without the ability to add keywords and meta descriptions, don't you think? A bit of a waste of bloody time, I'd say. So we'll have to go looking for some modules to help us out.

The Nodewords module

The fact that the core distribution of Drupal doesn't include functionality to add metadata to site content tells you something about what Drupal is: not quite a development platform like Ruby on Rails, but more powerful and flexible than a DIY for amateurs web content management system like Joomla!. It's something in between.

Fortunately it's not that difficult to add the proper functionality. It's not entirely obvious and easy either. So I'll tell you about it.

One way to add the required functionality in Drupal is to install the Nodewords module. There is another module that covers much the same ground, and that's the Integrated Metatags module. I haven't played around with that module, so I won't try to tell you which is better. I'll just tell you about the one I use, which is Nodewords.

Installation of the Nodewords module is just like any other module - upload it and enable it. Configuration is a bit more work. One thing you'll notice is that there is no Nodewords section in the Site Configuration menu. All the functionality is spread across other sections. Which is why I think this is a useful topic to blog about.

The first section to look at is in Administer - Content management. The Meta tags administration page has most of what you need.

The first two sections are two big lists of content types: meta tags to show on edit forms, and meta tags to output in HTML. There are a lot of options here. We'll just start off with the basics, and cover the others in other blog posts. We'll want to tick off Description and Keywords on both lists. Keywords don't really do much, at least not for Google optimization, but they're a handy place to mark down exactly which keywords you are targeting for a particular piece of content.

There are some other nice options here. You can simplify the creation of your meta descriptions a bit here by automatically using the teaser text from your blog entries. I don't recommend this - do the extra work and write a specific description for each blog post. That way you can optimize for the proper keywords in the description and wax poetic in your teaser text. You can do the same thing with your keywords and your content tags.

Let me take a moment to distinguish between keyword metatags and vocabulary tags.

The keyword metatag is a chunk of HTML that you can place in the header of your web pages. It doesn't have to be there, and in fact you can leave them out with no penalty: Google has declared that they no longer pay attention to the keyword metatag for page ranking.Since we're using Drupal, we never have to actually look at the HTML source code in any case.

Vocabulary tags are actually consequential, though. A vocabulary is a Drupal term: it helps Drupal organize its content for search purposes, for use in menus and programming, and for the site map. A site map is a very very very useful SEO tool - I'll blog extensively about that later.

In any case, the easiest thing to do is to ignore that feature. You DO need to add vocabulary tags to your content. You DON'T need keyword metatags. So automatically generating keyword metatags from your vocabulary tags is pretty inconsequential.

The next step is hidden but crucial. In Administer - Content management - Content types, edit each content type and make sure that under "Meta tags settings" the "Allow editing of meta tags" box is checked.

Another hidden step: Under Administer - User management - Permissions, make sure that your authenticated users can edit meta data by checking the "administer meta tags" options under the "nodewords module" section. You'll also want to check the individual meta tags you want them to edit, particularly "description".

That will do it. There are other things to worry about, but I'll cover them in other posts. If you have particular questions, please feel free to ask them in a comment to this post.