 Also the logo of amazing metrics and amazing metrics is our sister company and they are specialized in SEO search engine optimization, web analytics and search engine marketing. And we're really working very closely on our projects. We integrate them really well and that's why I wanted to give this talk today to explain you what we are doing in the area of SEO. So let's get started. First of all, I will quickly explain what and why SEO, why is it so important? Then I would like to give you a big picture and present the SEO process that we apply at amazing metrics. Then I will go into the more technical stuff, explaining what is in core and what modules we use and give you an update on Drupal 8 and then conclude the session. So yeah, first point, what and why SEO? There's SEO and there's SEM. SEO is the optimization of your visibility in the organic search results. The organic search results is the red area you see here and it is what is not paid by AdWords ads and it comes like below some of the AdWords and on the right side there is also more ads. And this blue area is called SEM, search engine marketing. So what is actually the difference between the two? SEO is not directly paid. You try to get on the first positions by creating a lot of activities you will do on the long run. So it has a long term impact and it's also not very immediate. You have to do it at least four to six months to get some kind of results. So be patient if you do SEO, but it also lasts very long. So you start with a lot of effort and then it has a plateau so you benefit on the long term from it. SEM on the other hand is very short term, very temporary. So you buy some AdWords on Google, you appear in this very good position on the top search results. You get a lot of clicks, but as soon as you stop paying, you will not appear anymore and you will not have any impacts anymore. So we always suggest to do both, like if you have a seasonal business, do seasonal ads when you have high season with AdWords, but for the long run, for increasing on the long term, do SEO. So why is it actually so important to be on the first results on search engines like Google? We see here this is a click analysis and you see people click according to the F that we know also from websites. So they start on the top left, they go a little bit to the right, they go to the left again, they go a bit below and they go a little bit to the right again and below again. But they stay in the first, I would say in the first third of the page. They don't, not all users go below because they have to scroll. So this is the first what they see and what they look at. That's why it's really important you optimize your site to be on the top three positions. This is actually also proven by numbers. So as you see here, the first three results get 100% of the user attention. And the further you go low on the results, you get less awareness, less attention. So that's why it's really important to be amongst the top three. Then what is with another, with a different, with another search pages? You see 62% of the users only look at the very first page. They don't click on further pages. And also what is the difference between Organic and AdWords, Organic and SEM, 67% of users actually prefer organic search results. So you will have on long term more success with SEM. Yeah, I don't know who has done SEO measures in the past. Okay, few people have. So this slide might not be so important for you, but I'll explain you anyways. There has been a old way of doing SEO and there's a new way of doing SEO. And what is important to understand is that search engines like Google or Bing, they try to more and more act as a human. They try to act as us, as the users. Because they would like to optimize the search experience for the users. They would like to provide the best user experience. And that's why they try to analyze the usability of the website. They try to see how you're gonna act on this site. So today you have to do measures like content increase. You have to create a lot of content. You have to increase your social media visibility. Like you have to do everything that is benefiting the user. In the past, what SEO experts try to do, they try to optimize for the machines. They try to optimize for the search engine machines. And this while in the past we know a lot about article spinning or keyword stuffing like just put on the footer of your page, put thousands of keywords, etc. But this doesn't help anymore today. It's really about creating a long term good content strategy and SEO strategy. So how do we do that? That leads me to the second point, SEO process. So SEO process, the whole big picture is a very multidisciplinary expertise. It's not only coding, it's not only technical. It has to go hand in hand together with the content creators. So that's why on the first step, we don't look at the website. We look outside of the website. Like first of all, we do a keyword analysis. What are keywords that are interesting for your domain, for your industry? Like for a Drupal agency, it's Drupal, it's web development, it's design, etc. So we look at these keywords, then we do a competitive analysis. Who is on the market with you? Is it a very battled market? Which keywords have still potential, etc. And then you look at how you are present on the social media channels. So this all includes non-technical stuff. And the outcome of this analysis is a SEO strategy. So what do you have to do in future? How is your status today? Where you wanna go and how do you get there? And keywords are playing a very important role in that. And this is why also the definition of the SEO relevant keywords come out of this analysis as well. Then as a second step, it is getting more technical. You do an onsite audit. And this onsite audit comprises the technical audit of your website, of your Drupal website, is everything there that search engines need. And we will go into details later about that. It also includes mobile. Google is now more and more considering also mobile factors for your ranking. They have different ranking on mobile and desktop. And yeah, it's the index in audit and as I said, also usability audit. Like search engines can now track in a certain way your usability of your website. So if this is done, usually the website goes live. And there's a third continuous SEO step. It's really important to have then a repetitive strategy where you create content, where you always check your success and see that the numbers are going up. So how does this go together with the development of a new website? So and that's the plan that we follow. As a first step, we need to define the goals. What is the goal of the client or what is the goal that you have with your website? Is it do you like to have leads for your agency? Do you like to have people read your blog content? Do you like to have traffic increase? And then based on these goals, we do a goal to do the off-site analysis that I've already explained you where we then have a strategy and keywords. And as a second step, we do the content strategy. How do you get this content in? Which content is it? In which ways? And this goes hand in hand with the definition of the features. You need, for example, you need content that comes in regularly. So you might have a blog feature. You have white papers. Okay, so you need a white paper section on your website. So these two really go hand in hand. And as soon as this is done, we do implementation of all that stuff. And short before the go live, we do the on-site analysis. And then if that's also positive, we do the go live and afterwards is a continuous improvement for one side SEO steps and for the other side of optimizations on the website itself. Sure. Go live. It's when you release your website, like let's say you don't have a website yet. You do a new one. And at some point, you release it. You go live, right? So this is a step. Good. That was now the big picture. And now let's dive into what is there to be done on the technical area. So what is there in core? Almost nothing. So you have to work a lot with the modules that are there. What you have is like the very basics. You have a no title, an H1, and you have the possibility to define SEO-friendly URLs. But it's not enough. And for Drupal 8, it's the same. So that's why I'm now going to show you the modules we're using. So first of all, what you would like to consider is a tracking tool. Because you would like to measure your success, right? You want to see if the numbers are going up, actually. You want to see if your funnels are successful. So we usually use Google Analytics. It has become the standard tool. And we integrated by adding the universal analytics code via the Google Analytics module. Then next thing, the robots.txt file needs to exist. So that search engine can crawl, actually, the right content. You can exclude things in the robots.txt file. What happened to us in the past is that we once added the disallow comment on the dev side and we forgot to take it out. So just check before you go live if the robots.txt file exists. Otherwise, no traffic. And you need a XML side map so that search engines know how to crawl your website intelligently. You help search engines with the XML side map. And there's a module for that. So just install the XML side map module and add side map to the robots.txt. So a big, big topic are the URL structure and the redirects. So the rule is that URLs should be readable, they should be user-friendly, and they should include very important keywords because this is also a factor for search engines. They should not be too long, they should be maximum 100 characters long, and you should use slashes to separate between categories and subcategories. So here I have added an example how it should look in the idea world. And you see also what Drupal delivers as a standard, it's the node IDs. So this doesn't give the user really good information and it doesn't have really search engines. So that's why you would like to make these URLs look better. For this, to achieve this goal, you use the path auto module. And what it does, it allows you to automatically define URL path aliases per file, per content type, per taxonomy term, per user, and per language. So your content editors don't have to add the alias by themselves manually, but the system is creating the URL alias automatically. For example, out of a content type, you usually use the node title. And I've also added a screenshot how this looks in Drupal, how you can configure it. They also filled out taxonomy terms, so it makes totally sense to say, okay, the first alias is a taxonomy term, and then, sorry, the vocabulary name, and then the term name. Good. Yeah, and yeah, you see here also an example. That is good. You have news as a category, and then you have the node title. So then you need to ensure that your nice URLs are also showing and are probably redirected. And you should also see that you have the least possible 302 redirects as possible. These are non-permanent, so this is not so good to have. And the global redirect module is the thing you have to use. It checks your current user URL for an alias, and then it does a redirect to it. I think this is pretty basic. There's one thing you really have to pay attention to is that you set the redirect from WWW to a non-WWW redirect, and you have to do that on a live server. Because if you don't do the redirect, Google looks at these two sites like separate sites, and you lose a lot of your ranking power due to that. And it's also annoying for users if they can't do that, can't add Vivi or not. Yeah, so another topic for URLs is when you use facet API and you use filtered searches. Per default, your URLs look like this. You have a lot of percentages and stuff in there. It's really long and it's not very readable. So what you would like to have there as well, the readable and user-friendly URLs. So in this case, you use the facet API pretty path module that Joseph wrote. And it generates the nice URLs such as alias and value, and we have an example here. You see they are in this URL. You see really nice readable things in there. It's much better than the many percentages. I will also put the slides on slideshare so you don't have to note everything down. Good. Another topic is for sure multilingual URLs. I guess for you also, multilingual is also a big topic. They should also look good with Roman letters. And you use the transliteration module for this. And it takes a unique code, text, and represents it in USS key codes. Here you see a nice example. Like you see here a lot of special characters in this note title, but they don't appear actually in the URL. Okay. Now that was all about URLs and redirects. Now we come to a really important topic. That's a title tag and meta description tag. Who is installing meta tag modules on their website? Okay, good. Most of you. So yeah, you have to make sure that you have a title tag, and it appears on the browser tab. And you have to ensure that you have the meta description tag. And you can also, like what is also important, that you activate it also for views and panels if you're using them. Because these are mainly very important pages, you want Google to find, and you want them to optimize. So you have the sub modules, meta tag views, and meta tag panels. And the meta tag module has also very other further functionalities. You can go really deep into that. Another example is the open graph settings. That is helping you to have really nice representation. Facebook, if someone is sharing a link on Facebook from you. So you also enable the sub module meta tag open graph. Yeah, okay. This is an example how it looks like. And this is basically an example how you have to integrate with your content editors. Because you can install these nice modules. But if the content editors are not taking care of that, it doesn't help a lot. Especially, like, I don't know if it happens for you too. But sometimes we don't have a summary on a content type. So then you have to instruct your users to go to the meta tags and to fill this out on a note. It's also important that you stick with 150 to 160 characters. If you have much less, user takes whatever it wants. Or it adds something. And if you have too much, it takes also the part they like. So it's really important to stick with the character limits here. Yeah, so that you will also be found on the image search. You should instruct your content editors to add the alt tags on images. They upload. And for this purpose, you don't need a module, but you need to activate the alt tag on the field configuration. And this is how it looks. I think most of you know that, yeah, also here, it is not enough to just enable this. But you also need to train the content editors to fill that actually out and show them the benefits that get out of that. Then it can happen that you have things you would like to hide. Like in our case, we have some content types where we don't want to show the full note view. For example, events is a topic that is coming up again and again. So events have so little information that they don't have a full note view. They appear only on the view as a view mode. So in this case, you want to hide the full note view from Google. And therefore, we use the rapid hole module. And there you can define what should happen when you are accessing the full note view. And you can then say redirect to the overview page. Yeah, a big, big topic, page load speed performance. The goal is that you have a super high performance of your website, desktop, and mobile. This is very important. And Google recommends one second or 1.4 seconds. It's not so clear. But at least it has to be really fast. What we are usually doing, we use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. There are lots of other tools around. But I mean, you want to be found on Google. So you can also use a Google tool to see what they think your performance is. And they give you also tips on what to improve. So this is a good tool. The whole performance area is for sure another topic. So I don't go into further details there. Yeah, then there is a little thing you should look at. It's the aggregation of JavaScript files. Yeah, per default JavaScript files are excluded from the robots.txt file. And Google can then not find this content. So just have a look that when you go live, that the JavaScript aggregator is enabled during the launch. Not to forget. So yeah, this was all the modules we were using. I built up the slides according to how we check everything. So we have a checklist before we go live. And we go through all these points and look are they fulfilled? Is the meta text module installed? Are the redirects working well? Is path auto working? So I recommend you to download the presentation and go through these points when you launch a website. Yeah. Yeah, what is the state of modules in D8? At the beginning I was checking the status of each module. And some modules are really, really far already, like the global redirect module and path auto. There are already versions available. For sure they are not finished because Drupal is always changing still. And there are lots of modules like rabbit hole that are not even started. So, but it was really hard for me to get the update. And if you're interested to help, I think you should go to the pages of each of the modules and check their status and get in contact with one of these, with the maintainers. In my opinion, SEO modules are really important for the first step of Drupal 8. Because for me, this is part of the basics you have to have for launching a website. Yeah, so now we come to my conclusions. In our agency, SEO is a fixed building part. So, we tell our clients that they have to have this. They have to have the SEO optimizations. They should have the off-site analysis. And we really like, we're really working tightly together with our company, Amazymetrics. Because it doesn't really help then you have a really fancy website, but no one is finding it. And if you define the goal together with the client, it's always about increasing traffic, increasing leads. And it's not only with fancy features, but it's mainly also with being found. So, you should also do SEO from the start on because it has some architectural specificities that you have to consider. So, it is a pain in the ass if you have to do it afterwards. For your content editors, they have to go to every node and add a meta description or something like that. So, from that point, this is really hard. And also from the point of the site building, it's hard to do it afterwards. So, try to really consider these things from the very beginning on. We have decided two years ago to have a separate company that is dealing with SEO because we think it is an expertise by itself. It's like, it's an ever and always changing environment. Like Google is constantly changing their algorithms. And you have to have someone that is really on top of this. And it also is not only technical, it's also like a lot of content and content related. So, it needs a specific person or a specific expertise. So, if you can afford it, have a person that is an expert in that. Yeah, as I said also at the beginning, we recommend doing SEO and SEM both in parallel. That means SEO is the basis, is the one that has a long-term effect. And SEM is more the temporary and campaign-related measure you take. Yeah, I have mentioned it also a lot. The last point, it's multidisciplinary. It has a techie part and it has also a marketing and content and publishing part. So, you should consider and work together tightly with other areas of your companies or with your customer. Yeah, this was it already. So, thanks for listening and yeah, questions. Do you recommend the Rabbit Hole module because showing Blankend and its hearts, the SEO for my site or because it's unpleasant to see blank pages? It's not very pleasant for your user. That is the point. You will have a full-note view that is not theme, that looks really strange. So, the most probably the user will go away and think, oh, that site is broken. No, it doesn't really hurt your ranking. Okay, oh, okay, left, right, left. Hi, is there an alternative module for MetaTax? Because we are having a problem with custom MetaTax like Google News, for example, that requires some custom MetaTax that the MetaTax module doesn't let you at, for example, or I think they let you customize Open Graph MetaTax for Facebook. But what if there's a new social network that you want to add, but you don't want to wait for the module to release? Well, the MetaTax module itself provides an API. So, if the integration is not there yet, for example, let's say we have a new social network that requires, or when Twitter cards came out, the good thing in the Drupal community, we will have somebody make that integration really fast. But if we do not have the APIs are there, so any of your developers could actually write that integration based on the MetaTax module. Or, for example, for the MasyLab Triple 8 site, we didn't have it available. So, we just added the MetaTax on our own in the theme layer, that's also possible. Yeah, I think it's really the strength of Open Source that we are one of the first adopting this because someone in the community has the same problem. So, anyone? Thanks. First of all, I'll comment on your question, is I'm glad to find out about Rabbit Hole because I have one page that it's just only a view. And so, the nodes that are used to create the view are unstyled. I don't want to have to work on them. They don't make any sense. I don't want anybody to see them. So, that's a great use case for it. But my question was for multi-sites, there's two, you have two domains that want to share some content. Are there any SEO problems with that and anything that Drupal can do to help with that? For instance, I've heard that Google will penalize you for having the same content appear twice in different sites. So, is there something that Drupal has to help you out with this? Like to specify which is the main site to track and to ignore site from the other one? Yeah, I know we had the case too. And I think it's hard. I think we didn't solve it because if you have two times the same content, it is there. What you can do is you can link to the same page. But then it doesn't work for your flow on the website. So, we had the same problem actually, but as far as I know, we couldn't solve that. Yeah, do you know how? You can kind of mitigate the problem by setting the canonical tag properly. But it's not a perfect solution either. Thank you. Well, my question is, sometimes I have some problems using SEO with Drupal because some modules, Oracle Trip, they generate some messy output, like views, for example. When you render feuds on the page, it generates too many divs, one inside another. I would like to know if you have some kind of fix you could do without having to rewrite all the output of the views or the thing you're trying to solve. Maybe yourself can help. I'm not sure if it's directly an SEO problem, but it's definitely something that bothers many people. So you can check out the mothership team that comes with a lot of strip-out logic that kind of, it tries really to get rid of most of the markup. And then, well, in the end, it's Drupal provides us with default templates. So in the end, we have to override them if we want to change them. You can use, for example, mothership to do so. Or there's also, when you use panels, there's minimal templates that you can use or display suite. There's lots of tools available that help us get rid of the markup. But by default, well, it's there. OK. Yeah. Well, I guess you're right. Thanks. So I have a question on how you approach your projects with your clients. If you don't have your amazing marketing company involved, do you, so this is an on-site technical piece of it, do you also advise them on keywords and strategy? Does that happen? And what's the? Yeah, exactly. This is what we do. So if we, amazing labs, get approached by a client, by a potential client, we have one section in the offer about the technical development. And then we have another section in the offer with SEO. And so we have, we separate them because we are two different companies. But we tell the client, look, it's really important. And I think it's easy to explain them. It's so obvious that if you build a new website, you want users to find them. So they understand most of the time. And then it's sometimes a bit of a problem with the budget. Because if you, you beat against other competitors. And if they don't include SEO, you are more expensive if you include it right away. So that's why we keep it into two different sections. And if we have enough budget, if we know that we don't really compete, we put it together because we really want it to be done. If we compete and there's a hard competition upon price, we take it out. For example, when we work Drupal with a tool like Angular or a framework external to serve the content, which tool can we use to improve the SEO that the JavaScript markup can't? Have not? Well, the good news is that apparently Google is also indexing JavaScript now. But traditionally, you were always, I guess, we're not doing, I don't think we have done an SEO optimization project that involved Angular, for example, or any JavaScript heavy application. But my classic approach would be that somewhere in the markup, I include all the content. So I can put it in a NoScript stack, for example, so that the search engine has it available. But I'm not an expert either on that topic. Maybe someone else. You want to comment? Hey, hidden link using just you hide a link using CSS. So the user won't see the link. And it links to a page where the view is rendered without JavaScript. So when the user renders the page, he's going to have all the Angular functionality. And when the engine enters the page, it's going to see the link and follow that and get the content. You don't need JavaScript. You can use the Google API to record page counts every time you refresh a view. And I read that Google is also working in order to improve that for Angular applications, because Angular is developed by Google, so they're working on that. OK, one last question, maybe? Thanks. Have you worked before with Rich's snippets and Drupal integration? And if you did it, how do you recommend to deal with that? I head over to you, sir. Rich snippets, if you have experience with Rich snippets. What kind of rich snippets exactly, I mean? Like Twitter cards? Well, we have implemented Twitter cards or open graph features, but yeah. Microformers, I don't have an experience. OK. Yeah, I think we can continue the discussion afterwards. So thanks for listening. And yeah, have a great last night at the conference.