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How to Easily Create SEO Friendly Urls on Drupal 2016

Drupal is one of the biggest content management systems (CMSs) second only to the likes of WordPress and Joomla. It is a high performance CMS that presents thousands if not millions of opportunities to its users. It is fun and very interesting to use Drupal but terms and conditions apply. One of these terms and conditions is that you must learn how to use it. Being a free open source content management system you will not need a degree in rocket science to understand the functioning of Drupal. Aside from the ‘how it works’ bit you will also need to learn a few tactics that will help you get to the top.

What is the goal?

You are creating a website, right? One of the needs that all websites have is high performance on the search engines. Remember that most internet users do not have time to go to page two and three of the website ranking by the search engines. They want to check the first page because the pages presented therein are believed to be the most authoritative. Enter SEO friendly URLs on Drupal. Is there anything like a SEO-friendly URL that you can create on Drupal?

Once you have installed Drupal and created a page, your URL is going to read something like: yoursite.com/node/258. This is not exactly the friendliest kind of URL for search engine optimization purposes. Drupal gives you the opportunity to set up ‘clean’ URLs similar to yourstie.com/about-us. Basically if you want to create a page that is very clean and specific to your company then you can do that easily.

First-time setup

Before you can actually activate the module you should ensure that the server you are using is setup to such that it can handle the so called ‘clean URLs’. This you can also do quite effortlessly. What you need to do is pay a visit to your admin page and then click on ‘clean URLs’. If it is possible, enable them but if you cannot then you need to make a slight adjustment to the site’s .htaccess file. The text is usually grayed out if it is not offering the option to enable.

From the root of your site open the .htacess file and look for the line that is labeled # RewriteEngine on. Remove the hash sign (#) then save and upload onto your server. Now you should be able to enable the Clean URLs on the admin page. Sometimes it is possible that the .htaccess file was not uploaded successfully and this means that you will still not be able to enable the Clean URLs. Check for that as well. In the event that it was uploaded well but you cannot enable then you might be in need of the mod_rewrite installation on your server. Get in touch with the hosting company to do this for you.

Path Module

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most favored digital marketing strategies being employed nowadays. Therefore it really is necessary to get that URL that is SEO friendly. It will make your marketing campaigns simpler.

Nonetheless before you can make use of these SEO-friendly URLs you should enable the ‘Path Module’. This you can do by going to Administer—Modules—Path and then click on the ‘enable module now’. Whenever you edit a page you should be able to see URL path settings. There is an input box where you can add your friendly URL which will be similar to the ‘about-us’. A word of caution though- you should never start this URL with a forward slash.

Path Auto for automation

To make this process automated you have the option of downloading the PathAuto module. This is especially beneficial when you are handing over the site to the clients. To spare them the effort of having to use a particular URL alias this process is both automated and totally configurable. Downloading the module is a very effortless task. Sites with several content types like ‘Events’, ‘Profiles’, ‘News’ can also have an easy time setting automatic URL aliases for the said content types. The settings are to be found under the ‘Node Path Settings’. Once you have enabled the module then go to /admin/build/path/pathauto

Benefits to be enjoyed

The benefits of creating these URLs are just so many and even more when you choose Drupal. They include:

1. SEO-friendliness- Drupal is SEO friendly itself and it gives you the chance of creating sites that are also in line with the principles of Search Engine Optimization.

2. Customizability- You can customize your Drupal site from the features and operations to layout and design

3. Fast deployment

4. Extensive and effective API support

5. Mobile friendly

These are just some of the many merits of choosing Drupal as your website’s platform. In case you have a challenge with your website there is support always ready to help you out.

Author Bio

Jack Dawson is a web developer and UI/UX specialist at http://BigDropInc.com/. He works at a design, branding and marketing firm, having founded the same firm 9 years ago. He likes to share knowledge and points of view with other developers and consumers on platforms.