Since I've now had this site online for just two weeks I think I can say a little about Drupal and SEO. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization", which means setting up your site to help the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) figure out what pages are on your site and what those pages are about.

As of today, December 5th, www.Drupnewb.com has 13 pages indexed by Google. I find that number by looking at "www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.drupnewb.com+www.drupnewb.com". I have mostly let Drupal handle the SEO. I have two links to Drupnewb, one from www.fluffycat.com and one from www.lunarforums.com. It is crucial to get links to any site to help the search engines find the site and let it know that the site is important. After getting those two links to Drupnewb I have concentrated on creating content for this site, and have not worried too much about SEO.

When first setting up Drupal I did Enable "Clean URLs" on Admin screen "Home » Administer » Site configuration » Clean URLs". I think this is probably good to do. If you are going to do this I would do it immediately upon setting up a new site. The reason to do it immediately is that you don't want any of your pages to be indexed by search engines as having two different URLs, which you would if your pages were first indexed as "www.drupnewb.com?node=7" and then later indexed as "www.drupnewb.com/node/7". If the same content is indexed as having two different URLs it is called "Duplicate Content", and can adversely affect your rankings. So, turn on Clean URLs right away and then don't think about it.

I'm certain that many veteran SEOers would disagree with me, but I would advise against using the Pathauto Module to set your URLs to be like this: "www.drupnewb.com/drupal-and-seo-part-one" instead of "www.drupal.com/node/12". There are two reasons for this. The first is that, if I understand correctly, Drupal would wind up using both of the above URLs to refer to this page, triggering a "Duplicate Content" problem. The second is that if you do change the page URLs, say if I went from "www.drupnewb.com/drupal-and-seo-part-one" to "www.drupnewb.com/drupal-and-seo-part-1" it will often take quite a while for the changes to be reflected, and will hurt your ranking - especailly if you have inbound links to the original URL. While "www.drupnewb.com/node/12" isn't pretty, it is very stable, so I would personally advise sticking with that.

Drupal does set page titles to be good right from the get go, which is extremely important. I see that for a blog page Drupal makes the page title by combining your blog entry title with your site name. Because of this it is important to have your blog entries reflect the blog page content if possible.

I also see that Drupal does not by default set up meta page descriptions or keywords. Meta page descriptions are important. I don't think meta page keywords are important, but they probably don't hurt. So, I should probably next install the "Nodewords" module to allow me to set meta tags for my nodes.