Website optimization, SEO best practices, strategic keyword usage, content marketing, heading tags, internal links.... And the “To Do” list unfolding in your head right now seems endless, right? You're well aware that you need to optimize your Drupal website, you also have more than just a clue about the big SEO tasks to tackle, but all this "ecosystem" of tasks and sub-tasks can get quite discouraging can't it? If only you had an SEO adviser at your service, “slicing” them all into smaller steps to take, clearly pointing them out to you... Well, guess what: you have Drupal 8 SEO Checklist module as your personal SEO counselor! It's built to point out to you which are the “must-take” steps for "pushing" your website forward in search results. And where do you add that it's got even more helpful in this last version of Drupal, as well!
I feel that I should start my post today with a mandatory clarification: the Drupal 8 SEO Checklist Module is, by no means, a replacement of an SEO expert (or of a team of SEO experts)! It's your handy SEO tool that will help you with your on-site optimization processes on the fly, but it doesn't compete with to real SEO gurus' time and expertise invested in keyword planing strategies, link building and other laborious and complex SEO-specific practices.
Now that we've settled this matter, let's get back to the Drupal 8 module of the day: the SEO Checklist!
If you're not yet familiar with this “partially” new SEO-oriented module, you'll find all (I hope) the answers to your legitimate questions relating it: What's in it for me?, How would it boost my optimization efforts precisely?, How would it ease my work as a non-marketer?
If you've already been using Drupal 8 SEO Checklist for harnessing Drupal's SEO potential for fuelling your own Drupal site with, then I'll do my best to point out to you what interests you in particular: Have its creators and maintainers changed it in any way? Have they brought any improvements to it when they ported it to Drupal 8?
Now, with my own checklist of questions to handle, I'd better get right to the heart of these highlighted matters, right?
1. How Does This Module Turn Drupal 8 Into an Excellent SEO Platform?
On top of my own “list of things that I love about Drupal 8” there's the whole “philosophy” behind it: empowering each team involved, making them grow independent from one another. In other words: simplifying the whole workflow!
A Drupal team isn't made of marketing experts only! So, Drupal 8 comes as such a handy tool for basically anyone wanting to optimize his/her website (be it an administrator, content publisher, website owner, Drupal developer) and having a basic understanding of SEO to start with.
How does it empower me, as a Drupal developer in Canada, for example?
Well, it provides me with a task list or... a list of “suggestions”, if you're not that fond of the word “task”, which gradually helps me implement SEO best practices naturally. And to optimize my content “on the fly”, as well: checklist-shaped convenience!
It's thanks to those to-dos popping up for each web page that I upload content on that I've come to instinctively add enough keywords across my pieces of content while I'm writing them, to pay attention to my headings, to go for a proper title lengths and to adopt meta description writing best practices, too.
See it as an SEO guide at your service, “surveying” your SEO habits and suggesting you (how) to correct and to improve them. Once you've managed to do that, you get to trigger Drupal's true SEO power, using it as a fuel for your own website!
And yet, I bet you'd like me to talk facts, to go through a list of specific capabilities that the Drupal 8 SEO Checklist module supports:
- it empowers you with a to-do list of tasks to complete for SEO-optimizing your website
- it signals you what other modules you should install for “turbocharging” your SEO strategy with
- it empowers you with crucial information regarding the SEO best practices you should consider adopting for properly optimizing your Drtupal 8 site
- it provides you with helpful CLI commands for Composer, Drupal Console and Drush
- it signals you the helpful links that you should be enabling and the tasks to complete for leveraging third-party SEO tools' potential, too (e.g. Mollom or Google Analytics)
2. How Does The Drupal 8 SEO Checklist Module Actually Work?
“It basically puts all the key SEO tasks to be completed on a silver plate for you”, would be my shortened version of the answer to this question!
And now, let me detail through a step-by-step guide :
- you download the module
- you enable it (obviously!)
- once enabled, you'll get to see, on the left sidebar of your admin screen, your checklist including tasks efficiently grouped according to categories
- as you scan them through, you'll notice that your to-do tasks cover various SEO aspects (ranging from meta tags to site performance, from clean URLs to security and the list goes on and on)
- you'll notice, also, that each one of these main categories comes with its own checklist to consider
- you're even given the means to complete your SEO tasks: links for downloading and enabling specific SEO-helpful modules and details about the settings to make in your admin screen. They're all there: SEO power at your fingertip (speaking of convenience, right?)!
4. What's New to the SEO Checklist Module in Drupal 8?
You've probably expected the Drupal community not to focus just on successfully porting this module to Drupal 8, right?
And your intuition hasn't let you down: those Drupalers in charge with its maintenance have brought improvements to Drupal 8 SEO Cheklist while porting it!
By far the most notable improvement brought to this module has been incorporating CLI commands in the module.
This will speed up non-marketers' work (especially Drupal developers' work, who're highly familiar with the working command lines) tremendously! Practically you can now simply take the CLI commands displayed next to each task included in your checklist and paste it in your command line, running them via Drush, Drupal console or Composer.
A major time-saver! Time that otherwise you would have spent trying to figure out what commands to insert in order to access specific modules.
5. How Does It Help Me, a Non-Marketer, Optimize My Website Quick and Easy?
As I've already mentioned in this post: Drupal 8 SEO Checklist module's built with the idea of promoting SEO best practices among non-marketers, as well.
Moreover, besides “promoting” them, the modules aims at making them far more accessible, easier to implement for anyone interested in optimizing his/her website.
Now since I've mentioned “anyone”, let me point out to you how this module eases non-marketers' lives/work, by taking 2 types of “roles” that a Drupaler can play within his/her team:
- a Drupal developer: he/she grows much more independent from the marketing team, more confident to perform key SEO operations himself with his comprehensive to-do list at his disposal
- a Drupal website owner: he/she is “craving” high ranking position for his enterprise/business Drupal site and, in this respect, this module streamlines his own modules selection work. Getting the desired ranking gets, therefore, less time-consuming and less frustrating, as well (not knowing, for sure, from the very beginning, which key SEO-oriented modules to enable and which ones to ignore can, otherwise, get quite discouraging)
THE END! This is where today's “episode” of my “Drupal 8 modules put in the spotlight” series ends! Don't hesitate to drop me a line about your own thoughts on Drupal 8 Checklist module, in the comments below. I'm curious whether you're using it and to what extend you consider that it boosts your own SEO efforts.