Top Seven Drupal 8 SEO Modules

Drupal is one of the most powerful content management systems in the world. It works great for both small and large websites, and thanks to its modular approach, it can be easily extended in many ways. One of the crucial aspects of a website is SEO, and Drupal 8 offers many modules that can help you improve your rankings in search engines.

The Drupal content management system is not only one of the most popular and widely used CMS platforms but also one of the best SEO-friendly ones. However, even the most SEO-friendly CMS can’t guarantee a top position in Google rankings. This is why Drupal 8 SEO modules are so important. They will allow you to manage your website more efficiently and achieve better results in your SEO strategy.

Drupal 8 SEO Modules Checklist

There are a lot of SEO modules in Drupal 8 to improve the search engine ranking and these are the top seven modules which are used for SEO in Drupal 8. These modules can be used for multiple purposes like for meta tags, sitemap generation, enhancing content visibility and XML sitemap.

These SEO modules have powerful features that can help you to optimize your website for search engines. Here are SEVEN of the best Drupal 8 SEO modules that will help you improve your website’s search engine rankings: So, let’s scroll down and find out:

1. Pathauto

Pathauto is a module that generates path aliases for various content types automatically. It also allows users to define custom tokens used in path creation. The paths generated can be based on predefined patterns and/or contain replacement patterns.

Pathauto is the successor of the Global Redirect module. This module lets you set up automatic URL alias patterns so that your URLs are cleaner and more user-friendly than their default node/[nid] or taxonomy/term/[tid] forms.

2. Redirect

The Redirect module is one of those modules you’ll use on every website. It’s the most popular module for Drupal 8, and it’s also the most installed module ever for Drupal, with over a million sites reporting that they use it. Redirect allows you to create and manage redirects from within Drupal, so you no longer need to manually add redirects to your .htaccess file as was required in Drupal 7 and below.

Unlike other redirect modules, Redirect is explicitly designed for Drupal. It integrates with core search (core/search) so that when a page or post is deleted or moved, the URL automatically gets redirected to the new location. Redirect supports internal and external URLs, works with path aliases and custom URLs, and creates log reports on all 404 errors.

3. XML Sitemap & Simple XML Sitemap

Drupal 8 core includes XML sitemap functionality. The XML Sitemap module is one of several contributed modules that extend Drupal 8’s core functionality. It adds the ability to include user accounts and taxonomy term pages in the site map, which are excluded from the core functionality.

Simple XML Sitemap is another excellent module that builds on the core sitemap functionality and allows you to customize your sitemaps. You can exclude specific content types and items, change the priority per content type or individual node, set up a custom URL for each content item, etc.

4. Meta Tag

The Metatag module for Drupal 8 automatically provides a website’s structured metadata(meta tags). As many perceive, meta tags aren’t just about meta titles and descriptions. Meta tags can also refer to other metadata added to the HTML document, such as viewport tags for responsive design or Open Graph tags for social media. The Metatag module supports all of these.

Designed with flexibility in mind, the Metatag module lets developers and site builders customize how URLs appear when shared on social media or in search engine results. The module provides an API so developers can add their custom fields, while site builders can easily configure predefined fields using Drupal’s administrative interface.

5. Google Analytics Module

The Google Analytics Module lets you track your site with Google Analytics by adding the required JavaScript to every page. The module also enables you to track download links, outbound links, and mailto links.

You can also exclude specific user roles from being tracked, and there are options to anonymize the IP address of visitors, remove query strings from URLs, disable tracking when an admin is logged in, and more.

Google Analytics module features:

• Add Google Analytics tracking code to Drupal pages.
• Track outbound links (including external and internal ones).
• Track file downloads (including tracking for non-HTML file elements).
• Support for multiple accounts
• Tracking of Maillot links.
• Excludes visits from individual users or roles (i.e., logged-in administrators).

6. Site Verification

The Site Verification module is a Drupal 8 module that provides an interface for verifying your site with Google, Bing, Yandex, and Pinterest.

Why do you need to verify your site?

Verifying ownership of a website is necessary for many things, such as:

• Setting up Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) to get data about your site’s traffic and performance.
• Submitting a sitemap to Google’s indexing system.
• Displaying AdSense ads on your site.
• Setting up the Pinterest Tag on your website.

To use the Site Verification module, navigate to Configuration > Search and metadata > Site verification (admin/config/search/site-verification). You can add and remove verification tokens for various search engines.

7. Search 404

Search 404 is a module that allows you to redirect your website visitors automatically to the page they were looking for. This could be used when a visitor tries to access an old link from a bookmarked page or a search engine, and the content has moved to another location.

In addition, Search 404 also enables you to create custom “404 pages” for specific URLs. This can be useful if you have recently deleted some pages from your website and want to send visitors somewhere else instead of just showing them an error message.

The bottom Line

These Drupal SEO modules have the power to boost your SEO and make sure that your website is presenting itself well. Search engines not only consist of text; they also search images, videos, and other online content. These are great modules to consider using with Drupal – especially if you want to improve your website’s SEO. However, not every module here is a sure-fire guarantee of SEO success in Drupal 8, and they are all relatively useful in helping to optimize your website.

We at LN Webworks have successfully implemented Drupal 8 SEO modules for our clients. Our experts study the requirements and modules required to suit clients’ business requirements. The outstanding features of Drupal 8 are custom blocks and views that help us create dynamic content for our client websites.