Optimizing Your Drupal Site (& Your Content!) for Search Engines

Time: 
07/24/2015 - 11:15-07/24/2015 - 12:00
Room: 
Auditorium
Experience level: 
Beginner
Session Track: 

Business and Strategy

The purpose of this track is two-fold - one angle helps you to understand the advantages of Drupal from an organizational leadership angle and the other is to highlight the great Drupal sites and projects you're working on and to show what's possible. These sessions are business focused, and will be non-technical.

Whether your site consists of relatively few evergreen pages or a large database of evergreen pages and serial content (e.g. news releases), you’re likely concerned about search engines directing people to your site when they need the information you offer. Performing search engine optimization (SEO) on your site can lead to higher search rankings and increased traffic, but it can be difficult to weed through SEO advice and differentiate good tactics from bad ones — and to know how to measure success.

During this talk, a strategist and a Drupal developer will go over SEO best practices and key steps you can talk to implement them in both your content and your Drupal configuration, covering:

  • How to structure your content for to increase its findability for search engines — along with its readability and its accessibility (compliance with Section 508 guidelines)
  • How to configure Drupal to make it easier for your content administrators to create optimized content
  • How to select Drupal modules that can automate SEO-friendly URLs, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, and sitemaps…
  • …and how to overwrite that automation when needed
  • How to configure Google Analytics dashboards to help you monitor the user interactions you care about — and how to display some of that information within Drupal

This session will include a demo of recommended Drupal configuration and instructions for implementing it, as well as a demo of Google Analytics dashboards in action.

It will be presented by Jason Wasser, a developer with expertise in Drupal site-building and theming, and Lauren Villeneuve, a senior strategist at who’s crafted digital strategies for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST)’s Baldrige Program, and the Center for Disease Control (CDC)’s National Prevention Information Network.

 

Presentation Slides