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Promoting sites on Drupal: the specifics and some advice

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Promoting sites on Drupal: the specifics and some advice

Drupal is a popular, convenient CMS. It suits corporate sites, business card sites and online shops. Promoting sites on Drupal has several particular features, mostly to do with technical optimisation and configuration. 


The advantages and drawbacks of Drupal 

a picture from Drupal.orga picture from Drupal.org

To understand how to promote sites on Drupal, let us go through its strengths and weak points. 

The advantages of Drupal 

  • Simple administration. Running a site is straightforward. The admin panel is convenient and intuitive. Filling the site and updating the content requires no particular technical skill. 

  • Fast indexing. Sites on Drupal are indexed quickly. Every page is easy to optimise for search engines' requirements. 

  • Drupal is free. That makes it an excellent option for beginning developers who cannot afford large project costs, and for small businesses.

  • A variety of themes and designs. Many themes have been created for Drupal for building online shops and other websites. 

  • Versatility. Many modules have been built for Drupal that simplify working with the code and make additional site functions possible. 

  • A high level of security. Drupal is one of the best protected content management systems. Its internal mechanisms are quite enough to repel most attacks. 


Drawbacks 

There are difficulties too, and everyone who builds and promotes sites on Drupal will meet them. 

Duplicate pages. The CMS creates many service pages, some of which are duplicated. You can find them using Google Search Console — duplicates will have the same title tag. The best solution is to hide them from indexing in the robots file. 

Slow loading. Finished sites on Drupal are fairly slow. It takes a programmer several hours of work to optimise the code and reduce the loading time. 


The factors that affect successful promotion 

The ranking factors are the same for sites on every CMS. So we will briefly remind you how each of them works. 

Structure. A site's structure has to be built around its functions and around the decisions competitors have made. On how to build a structure and how it relates to the semantic core, read our article on building a site.

The site's design. The appearance of every page affects the behavioural factors, and those affect the site's positions in Google. So the design of a site on Drupal has to be considered and restrained, without unnecessary effects and complicated typefaces. 

Page loading speed. It depends on the site itself and on the hosting you choose. Host4Biz offers a range of plans that suit both small business card sites and the portals of large corporations. For the site to work well and rank well, we recommend obtaining an SSL certificate and connecting Cloudflare. 

Content. Everything is clear here: the user has to get as much information about the goods and services as possible. But do not bet on text alone. For instance, if you are wondering how to lay out a product card, analyse the sites of successful competitors and combine their solutions. It is worth placing video (better kept on YouTube), tables, infographics and so on on the site. 


On-site optimisation of Drupal sites 

Most of the technical tasks connected with the SEO optimisation of Drupal sites can be solved with ready-made modules. One of the most popular add-ons for Drupal is GlobalRedirect. It lets you remove every duplicate URL in a few minutes. 

The Nodewords module simplifies work with page meta tags. Title and description can be written manually or automatically. 

Whatever the CMS, you have to work on the sitemap.xml file. It helps search robots crawl the site. It holds information about the site, about how often it is updated and about the addresses of all its pages. The XmlSiteMap component will help create a sitemap. In the add-on's menu you have to enter every URL Google should index. 

To keep track of the results, connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console to the site. For analytics you can also use: 

  • Ahrefs;

  • Serpstat;

  • Similarweb. 


Conclusions

Promoting sites on Drupal will bring results if you take the CMS's particular features into account and use the functionality its developers created properly. Most of the requirements of Google and the other search engines are the same for sites on 

  • every engine:

  • fast loading;

  • a convenient structure;

  • good, regularly updated content;

  • a gradually growing link profile. 

Hosting plays an important part in promoting a site too. It has to keep the resource running steadily even under heavy traffic and provide maximum security. Host4Biz guarantees reliable storage for your sites. 

Read our blog and order hosting, the lease of a domain name and servers in the best data centres.