Now you have a working site. The next priority should be driving traffic to your site. There are many methods available: email spamming, buying ads, banners ... But one of the most common ways is through organic search, especially Google. It is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

What SEO made of

SEO = Great content + Onsite optimization + Link building

SEO = Great content + Onsite optimization + Link building (sorry for my bad drawing)

Search Engine Optimization is not a magical black box. SEO experts are not magicians with magic wand which can cast you into the top of the Google search result list. But SEO requires a lot of work to make your website greatly welcomed by Google.

  1. Great content: you have to be interesting to attract readers. In the world of web, interesting content are text. So you should write things that people want to read. This job depends all on you, no SEO agencies can write epic stories for you.
  2. On-site optimization: it involves careful site structure so Google can crawl and knows your site quickly. This job can be done by you or SEO agencies.
  3. Link building: the more links from relevant websites that point to your site, the more likely you are ranked higher on the search results. This job is the strength of SEO agencies because it requires a lot of manual work to collect links. 

I do not attempt to show you all on this guide. In fact, I can't. Each topic above is so broad. There are tons of materials over the Internet about them.

I want to show you the overall approach so you know what to do next, and you won't get scared. If an SEO agent comes to you and say they can get you on the top of the list in a few months, you can no longer believe it easily.

What can Drupal help you with SEO?

I am not an SEO expert. I have small budget for advertising, so I have to figure out how to do SEO which costs less but still have good results. I can not spend huge money on off-site SEO like buying ads. It is too expensive and risky. Therefore, I'd rather focus on on-site SEO, ie, making my content attractive and let Google knows about it. Fortunately, Drupal provides many great tools to help me with on-site SEO.

Comments

Yep I know, some of my pages

by tuthanh - 01/05/2011 - 23:19

Yep I know, some of my pages are not filled up with enough words.
But this is a book, which have many pages. I did not create for SEO, I created for human reading. These are instructions to mastering Drupal. I want to make it deadly simple as possible.
I myself don't like to read a long article, it is created for SEO. It has enough words, keyword density, keyword in title, h1, h2, links ... But most of its content is made up to fill up spaces. Why make thing complicated when it does not have to be so?