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How to Get the Most out of Your SEO in Drupal 9

Mediacurrent Team — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 19:13:45 +0000

How to Get the Most out of Your SEO in Drupal 9

This post is an updated part of our Marketer's Guide to Drupal series. This guide will walk you through considerations for choosing an open source CMS, plus case studies and CMO advice to bring your site to the next level.

Supercharge SEO with Drupal

“Over the last 20 years, Drupal has grown into one of the largest enterprise content management systems in the world.” - Drupal Founder Dries Buytaert

Along with the growth of Drupal, the marketing landscape is vastly different now than it was 20 years ago. The same techniques once used to make the top of the search engine no longer work, so marketers need to understand the powerful role a CMS like Drupal can play in building a successful SEO strategy.

The release of Drupal 8 marked a significant stride in giving content authors more control. That focus continues to evolve with Drupal 9. Notable editor-focused features include a templating engine called Twig for component variety, an API-first foundation to “write once, publish everywhere”, and an editor-friendly content block authoring experience. Layout Builder additionally provides a "drag and drop" module that lets editors add components to pages and add pages to the site with no code. Now, Drupal 9 has even more upgrades for marketers, tech-savvy or not.

This shift places the marketing team in the driver’s seat more often and allows them to get involved in the CMS decision. In this post, we’ll outline some ways you can up your SEO game with Drupal.

Traditional SEO is Dead

No longer will well-placed keywords alone get you to the top of the SERP ranks. Content is still King in the world of marketing, and it’s what helps you improve your SEO.

Every algorithm change Google has made has one thing in common: it aims to provide the best content based on what it "thinks" the user is trying to find. In other words, the user’s intent. If you want your rankings to stick, don't try to cheat the system. Attract your prospects with informative, entertaining pieces that they can use to take action. And avoid no-value posts that are keyword-stuffed with your industry and the word "best" 100 times. Google can see through it and so can all of your users.

That said, there are a few other factors that are critical to keeping your rankings high that can’t be ignored, including quick load times and mobile-friendliness. Drupal 9 is built with several of these factors in mind to help us make needed improvements quickly and effectively.

Mobile-First Mentality

Drupal 9 is created with responsive design capabilities built-in, so you can begin to address many problems immediately. That’s not to say all of your responsive problems will be solved. Content editors still need to think through their content and imagery, and themers will still need to do configuration to establish things like breakpoints. But Drupal 9 will set you on the right path, giving you and your team many of the tools you need.

You’ll also have the option to choose different images and content for desktop and mobile versions right from the WYSIWYG editor, making it easier to see the differences for every piece of content when you add it and before you publish. This means a solid visual of both versions in real-time for faster publishing and peace of mind knowing exactly what your users experience on any device.

The Need for Speed

Another big factor that could affect your rankings is speed on both desktop and mobile. Google places such high importance that they provide a PageSpeed Insights test to show where and how your website is slowing visitors down. Drupal 9 is “smart” in that it caches all entities and doesn’t load JavaScript unless it has to. This means the same content won’t be reloaded over and over and instead can be loaded quickly from the cache. It also uses a feature called velocity, which makes creating and publishing new dynamic content experiences is significantly faster than in Drupal 7 and older Drupal versions.

Responsive design is a must-have in today’s digital landscape and speeding up your website on both desktop and mobile is a surprisingly effective way to contribute to your SEO efforts. In short, if your marketing team is focused (as you should be) on top rankings, Drupal 9 provides many of the tools to make that happen.

Accessibility = Key for Search

Drupal 8 spurred an overall commitment to accessibility from the community, and with the release of Drupal 9 came another big push toward improving web accessibility, including:

Technical features for improved accessibility like controlled tab order and aural alerts (See our post on Exploring Drupal’s Built-In Accessibility Tools)
Additional support for Rich Internet Applications in the form of WAI-ARIA support
A new front-end theme, Olivero, which focuses on even greater accessibility
All features conform with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines

This is important because, as we know, the relationship between web accessibility and SEO is closely intertwined. Although accessibility is not actually a Google ranking factor (yet), improving accessibility on your website has a high chance of improving your SEO rank.

SEO Friendly Modules for Drupal 9

There are thousands of modules available for Drupal 9, many of which are perfect for marketers. Whether you’re looking to try out something new or to find something that fits what you already know, you have your pick. Here are our favorite SEO modules to use when optimizing your site:

Metatag - allows you to automatically provide metadata, aka "meta tags", that help search engines understand your content. This must-have module offers over 300 different meta tags for different purposes, so take a look and find the right ones for your site.
Two Metatag submodules that we highly recommend are Twitter Cards and Open Graph. Connect your site to Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, and other social platforms and control how links will look when shared on them.
Schema.org Metatag - provides a way of adding some of the hundreds of standardized metadata structures from the international schema.org project on a site, making it easier to clearly define metadata that Google et al can use to more accurately understand your site’s unique information.
Pathauto - helps save you time from manually having to create URL path/aliases as new content is created.
Sitemap - provides a site map that gives visitors an overview of your site. It can also display the RSS feeds for all blogs and categories.
Redirect - Almost every new site needs to incorporate 301 redirects for old page URLs. This gives site admins an easy interface for creating those redirects in Drupal.
Google Analytics - this simple module allows site admins the ability to easily configure Google Analytics in Drupal.
Easy Breadcrumbs - uses the current URL (path alias) and the current page's title to automatically extract the breadcrumb's segments and its respective links.

Thankfully, because Drupal is open source, you’re not out of luck in the instance that you can’t find a module that works for you. There are many options available for making a new one that works, from building it yourself to enlisting help from a Drupal team like Mediacurrent.

Visualize SEO Success with Siteimprove

In addition to Drupal's SEO-friendly modules, an SEO optimization tool like Siteimprove can…

Give content editors information about their technical SEO to make more informed decisions
Gain an understanding of how SEO and content intersect for your overall strategy
Flag potential issues before your content is published
Provide insights about the SEO impact on unpublishing a page

The Siteimprove module works directly in Drupal, giving editors access to these insights while they’re adding content. This means no more waiting to fix it post-publish. It is important to correctly set up Siteimprove in order to get the most out of it and effectively transform your strategy into a workable roadmap for your site.

SEO and Beyond

Drupal’s content management system is perfectly structured for search optimization and its core features support many of the critical SEO elements. But features only take you so far on their own. To manage and continuously improve your SEO, consider a dashboard like Siteimprove that you can customize to show you just how the data is processed and how it impacts your business's goals.

Setting those custom data points and interpreting the data that comes in can be time-consuming and difficult, so if you need any help, our team of Siteimprove certified experts can apply our knowledge to configuring your dashboards and making sense of the data. Get started with a Siteimprove tune up.

Mediacurrent Team Wed, 03/03/2021 - 14:13

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Webinar Recap: Reimagining Your Higher Ed Web Strategy

Mediacurrent Team — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 13:36:53 +0000

Webinar Recap: Reimagining Your Higher Ed Web Strategy

In our recent webinar, we set out to help higher ed marketing teams rethink their digital focus for the year ahead.

We tapped a group of experts with years of experience helping some of the best-known colleges and universities deliver engaging digital experiences to discuss key web strategy takeaways. Members of the expert panel included:

Muzel Chen - Senior Digital Strategist, Mediacurrent
Diane Kulseth - Senior SEO Consultant, Siteimprove
Steve Persch - Technical Product Marketing Manager, Pantheon

If you missed our webinar or want to watch it again, check out the full recording:

The live audience came ready with their most pressing questions on topics from personalization and SEO best practices to harnessing analytics and breaking down the communication barriers between Marketing and Admission departments. Below is a summary of what was discussed on the webinar.

Personalization

Is personalization dead?

Diane Kulseth: I've seen some higher education institutions using personalization effectively by auto-populating forms. That can be really helpful to keep things seamless for the experience for the student. At the same time, we're talking to a generation that's getting more and more skeptical of the internet.

There's a misconception that adopting new technology will automatically save you time. Technology, like personalization, can save you a lot of time but it will also take time to implement correctly.

Steve Persch: Technology buying decisions are often made on the assumption that by buying a tool, you will get to spend less time doing a certain task. I think a similar motivation leads a lot of people to buy personalization. They think getting a more powerful measuring tool will fix their problem, but it actually gives you more to measure and requires more of your time.

Muzel Chen: There’s also the issue of how do we use personalization effectively? Students want to get information right away and personalization can reduce these obstacles in navigation and process.

Personalization can mean many things, but in the context of higher ed, we can personalize content for an audience based on their common demographics and behaviors. But it also depends on your medium: are you trying to personalize in social media? Website? Email? Text message? Audiences have different expectations from each marketing channel, which is predicated by the amount of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) they have disclosed to those channels.

Depending on the context and level of personalization, they can range from convenient to creepy, and striking that right balance can be tricky. But when it works, visitors experience a higher level of engagement because of the convenience and they feel the institution cares about them.

SEO Best Practices for Subsites and Domains

When thinking about a redesign, I know websites should have ONE main goal, but how do you handle a few different audiences without creating microsites? For example, prospective vs. current students?

Muzel Chen: Some of these issues are mitigated by dedicating an area in your architecture for those specific audiences. But there are situations where it feels the content is servicing all audiences or only one exclusively. These situations typically result in microsites which can be difficult to manage.

An easy way to address those needs is to start with an audience-neutral page, have the audience self-identify, and place those audience-specific pages at a deeper level. For example, common pages where this occurs are: campus living, parking permits, and health services. These top-level pages will have content that speaks to all audiences and grows in detail as the visitor goes deeper into your site. The details can then begin to diverge by audience type.

Do you see any trend of separate sites vs. subsites for academic departments (or other smaller units) within a university or college?

Muzel Chen: Over the last decade, it's been very common for higher ed to have subdomains (separate sites) for each individual department or school. But, these sites grow out of hand and become difficult to manage especially when there's not any established governance for tracking content updates across all of the subdomains.

More institutions are starting to transition to the subfolder (or subsite) practice. It’s easier to see the big picture of all your sites and manage them all within their content management system.

How can one build a culture of importance for SEO across a decentralized organization (i.e., schools, departments, and offices, like Admissions, all run their own websites)?

Diane Kulseth: I think the biggest part is tying it back to what it all means. Whether it's donor relations, increased revenue for the university, or admissions, tie it back to their goals. That's first and foremost and all of that helps the website and it helps your students. It helps your donors. It helps your prospective parents of students to be able to better navigate the website.

SEO is great for SEO's sake and building great traffic, but it's also really helpful for all your other marketing initiatives to make sure that people are able to get where they want to go on a seamless web experience that loads properly and is easy to navigate with strong information architecture.

Marketing Strategy and Analytics

What are some of the challenges you've seen higher ed leaders face when implementing marketing technology?

Muzel Chen: Reporting. I often see data collection tools being misconfigured. Or collecting lots of data without really defining its purpose. Everybody wants to get access to analytics data, and once that's provided, they use it once and never touch it again. Suddenly, you have 100 users and nobody is providing insights. Without data, all planning comes down to guesswork.

Steve Persch: You almost need Google Analytics for your Google Analytics to track who's using it.

Which analytics data seems to be the most valuable to higher ed? I realize this is likely very organization or campaign dependent, but anything generally useful that may not be obvious?

Diane Kulseth: First and foremost, you want to have your reports on RFIs or requests for information and your applications, and then connect that to enrolled students within your CRM or admissions platform.

Beyond that, once you start digging deeper, it's really important to start looking at insights like when people are coming to this page from an advertising campaign, are they actually engaging with the page for a substantial amount of time? Are they going elsewhere? How are they responding to your marketing messages? Can you get even more granular and start looking at the demographics behind them? Are these men, women, what are their age ranges? What other insights can you glean from your different tools? I think all of that can be really helpful, but again, start with your basics: RFIs, enrollments, and applications.

Overcoming Department Silos

Do you have any tips for how Admissions and Marketing can work together?

Steve Persch: Shifting to an iterative or agile mindset for your website is especially difficult when so much of a university operates on a semester or year-long calendar. There's an expectation that you need the web plan for the next year or 10. Saying we're going to do small experiments and get feedback week by week is challenging to accomplish in the higher ed ecosystem. However, I think that you need to find a way to do it with strong cross-departmental relationships across those silos.

Muzel Chen: We talked about analytics access as one of the technology challenges, but as far as a people challenge, what I see most often is communication. A lot of departments are still siloed — especially marketing and admissions.

A good starting point here is setting up a meeting cadence where you can share common challenges to solve and opportunities to pursue. For example, an ideal project is to link marketing and admissions data, which tracks the visitor as they leave the main site and enters the application process. Marketing could validate their campaigns by reviewing the application data, whereas admissions could personalize the student experience by using marketing’s data.

Optimize Your Higher Ed Site

Explore how RainU CMS can help your school launch on Drupal in 30 days or less with a Pantheon-powered hosting solution. Together with Siteimprove, Mediacurrent’s digital strategists can help you optimize your website for SEO, accessibility, and overall performance.

Mediacurrent Team Thu, 02/11/2021 - 08:36

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Friday 5: 5 Metrics Indicating it's "Time for a Redesign"

Mark Casias — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 22:34:30 +0000

Friday 5: 5 Metrics Indicating it's "Time for a Redesign"

Happy Friday everybody! This episode we are joined by Dawn Aly who will go over 5 Metrics to look at which indicate it is time to update your site. Things to look at include

Your Conversion Rate is too low
Your Mobile Conversion Rate is low (or non-existent)
Your Traffic Numbers are low
Your Bounce Rate is high
Your Page Load Time is high

Mark Casias Fri, 01/19/2018 - 17:34

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DrupalCon Baltimore 2017 - SEO, i18n, and i18n SEO

Damien McKenna — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 18:09:31 +0000

DrupalCon Baltimore 2017 - SEO, i18n, and i18n SEO

DrupalCon Baltimore 2017 was, without a doubt, a great event. The first DrupalCon to hit the US East Coast since DrupalCon DC in 2009 so this (ex-) New Englander was happy to have just a day's drive to get there.

As I had missed DrupalCon New Orleans in 2016, I was eager to make the most of this year's event. Given I've been the lead maintainer of the Metatag module for a while it should be no surprise that I focused on SEO-related sessions and BOFs this time around. I also have an interest in internationalization and multilingual functionality, so I made time to attend some related sessions and BOFs.

SEO seminar

The person who literally wrote the book(s) on Drupal SEO, Ben Finklea, held a multi-hour mini seminar on improving a Drupal site's SEO rating. Ben stepped through a number of techniques and tools to help, appearing to follow the latest edition of his Drupal book. I stopped by for a few moments and was pleased to see a good crowd in attendance.

SEO BOF

As is my tradition, I held a Birds-of-a-Feather, aka "BOF", focused around search engine optimization. The BOF was very well attended, with a few people having to stand as all the seats had been filled already.

Metatag

We started the discussion on Metatag. I explained how I'd always considered that the release of an an "easy" or "simple" edition of a module to be a sign that the maintainers had failed on their goal of porting a module to a new release of Drupal. upon seeing someone release a module called "Easy Meta" I released Metatag 8.x-1.0 within three days at the end of January, just to get it out the door. I mentioned that the Views integration was a high priority for the next release, which did in fact go into Metatag 8.x-1.1 at the end of May.

One point we discussed was that it could take some effort to properly build out the necessary configuration using Metatag for a site. Ben Finklea joined us and explained that, even as a seasoned user of Drupal 8 and Metatag, it could still take him upwards of eight hours to fully tune each content type, vocabulary, etc on an average site, because of the need to go back ‘n forth between different settings forms to configure everything. I mentioned how I had the same experience, how I had built a spreadsheet to list all meta tags to help plan out how it all should be configured across an entire site, but that after two or three sites it then became almost more effort to go through and copy/paste everything into Metatag. I then shared how I had been working on a huge spreadsheet-like grid UI for managing the default configurations, but that it then lead to other problems, most notably that it could cause PHP to fail due to the number of form fields being submitted. Clearly, further work is necessary to improve upon this, so advice and help would be greatly appreciated.

A few other items came up with regards to Metatag. One item that was discussed was the possibility of being able to have a live-ish preview of what the meta tags would look like before saving changes. Some work was done for that but ultimately I felt it would need to be AJAX-driven and could get complicated to handle, especially with images and other files that could be on the form, but it definitely would be nice to have.

A pain point that some mentioned was that it can be hard to tell where individual meta tag values come from. For example, if a node has an output that contains incorrect information, it can be difficult to tell whether the output is overridden on that individual node, whether it comes from the content type's configuration, the content configuration, or the global configuration. There aren't any current plans to tackle this problem, but I'm definitely open to ideas.

Another idea that was discussed was having a way of uploading files for the various site validation features that some services use, e.g. Google. While many of these prefer something to be added at the DNS level, they still suggest uploading a text file of some sort to help prove ownership over a domain. Right now Metatag has a site validation submodule which supports several services, so it might be useful to have a separate way of uploading the text files into this system, rather than having to go through the global default configuration. There is a separate Site Verify module, but there were plans to deprecate it in favor of using Metatag, but the UI for Site Verify is easier for people who just want to do this limited task.

A final discussion point related to Metatag was in regards to JSON-LD support. Right now there are two sandbox modules available which can add some rudimentary support, though neither one is overly functional and expects the site builder/administrator to have a good deal of knowledge and skill to customize the JSON data correctly. One person I talked to prior to the BOF had suggested leveraging the data from the RDF UI module, which already provides much of this data in an appropriate structure, so it would just take extending the output to match the JSON LD format. This is not something I've personally gotten into yet, but I feel it is the next step in SEO functionality for websites so it is on my list to look at.

Schema.org and microdata

Moving past Metatag, we talked about schema.org. A pain point for people who implemented this functionality on their site was that the specifications appear to change with little notice - Google's validation tool would change its formula fairly frequently without any updates being provided on their official blogs. One site handled the schema.org output at the theme level, which worked but is a little clunky, given it is putting business logic in the theme.

One interesting tidbit that came out of the BOF was related to schema.org's data structures. Apparently, they're "very good", to quote one attendee, at expanding the specifications to cover new data models. So, should that need arise, it's apparently worth taking the time to reach out to the schema.org people. Good to know!

Sitemaps

In the sitemap world, most of the attendees were using Simple XML Sitemap as the original XML Sitemap module's development had pretty much stopped. The module doesn't (yet) cover every use case, but what is available has been very reliable.

On a related note, the GoogleNews module could use some TLC; it's a news standard that isn't used too much, but some sites have had some good success with it.

Google AMP

One of the recent changes in web performance is the AMP system from Google. Lullabot has put together a step-through guide (https://www.lullabot.com/articles/how-to-try-out-amp-with-drupal) on using a module and theme combination for making a site AMP-capable, and several people mentioned they'd used it with good success. Discussing AMP in general, people lauded its speed for visitors but mentioned content had a really high bounce rate, generally a low engagement, and the few who tried had a difficult time trying to break the visitor out of the AMP page.

During the course of the BOF, an idea sprang up about extending the SEO checklist module to have it work on a per-entity basis. Ben Finklea had been considering this functionality but had not built it out yet. The idea would be to help improve the SEO value of individual entities, e.g. nodes, e.g. to make sure that it has a good URL, that it has image and description meta tags, etc. This sounded like a great idea and hopefully something will come of it.

Internationalization (i18n)

For a community and software project that is worked on by thousands of people around the world, the ability to localize content and interface is an important requirement. Drupal 8 really shines in this regard and over the week there were many sessions and BOFs dedicated to helping people make the most of it.

On Monday, while all of the training was being held, about twenty of us gathered for the third Community Summit. First held in New Orleans, my first summit was at DrupalCon Dublin where I enjoyed hearing great insights from the wonderful Jenny Wong about how the WordPress community is organized and operates.

Working as a somewhat unconference style, this time around the summit fairly quickly split into two main subgroups - one focused on event organizing and all that it entails, and another on aspects of promoting and supporting Drupal with an international audience.

It may not come as a surprise to many, but while Drupal the software has amazing flexibility for supporting every single language out there, the drupal.org community site itself and related infrastructure pieces are almost exclusively English. Some regional communities have sprung up around the world to help fill in the gaps locally with their own support infrastructure and events, prime examples being Drupal France and Drupal Brasil, both of which have very active communities.

One attendee, Seferiba Salif Soulama who was able to join us thanks to a grant from the Drupal Association, shared his experiences trying to promote Drupal in his French-dominant home country of Burkina Faso, in mid-Western Africa. He talked about the difficulties he had finding training materials in French and mentors from other countries who would be able to help. Seferiba also discussed how he had set up some training programs at local high schools to get students interested in Drupal, and shared how he was making efforts towards getting Drupal considered as a standard platform within the government; he explained that with people from other OSS communities also attempting to get their platform adopted, there is much work to be done.

The last item I'll mention was a BOF focused around internationalization, lead by two people from Lingotek. The small group of about a dozen people shared stories of different projects they'd worked on and some challenges they'd encountered. There definitely was a strong sense amongst the group that there was a lot of difficulty in getting Drupal 7 working right for different scenarios, given how many different approaches there were, and how many modules could be involved. At several times when a question was raised about a specific use case, it was noted that it would be much easier to achieve the end results with Drupal 8 than with the Drupal 7 instance the person had been using.

SEO meets i18n

On Wednesday Mediacurrent's own Jen Slemp and Lingotek's Calvin Scharffs tag-teamed on a short presentation that brought the worlds of internationalization and search engine optimization together for the first time at a DrupalCon conference. Their presentation was packed with good advice, and the recording is well worth taking the time to watch.

Grand finale

As has become the DrupalCon tradition, the finalé was the Trivia Night, with questions once again provided by the tricksters at Drupal Ireland. With most of the Mediacurrent gang already headed home, I joined a group of Acquians which included Wim Leers and Ted Bowman. While the group had already chosen their table name by the time I arrived, Ted suggested that with me on their team they should have named the group "Wim Ears". Because of my infamous rabbit ears... ==:-)

Anyhoo.. both of my topics of interest came up as questions over the night. The first one was around about round three when the night's emcee, the ever eloquent Jeff Eaton, challenged the audience to name one of the two maintainers of the Metatag module, either by their real names or their drupal.org names. Given that Metatag is the fifth most popular module for Drupal 8 I strongly suspect that a large majority of teams got that question correct, and it was an honor to mentioned in a question! Incidentally, the correct answers were either "Damien McKenna" or "Dave Reid"; alternatively, our drupal.org usernames would have been "DamienMcKenna" or "Dave Reid" - as you can tell, we're an original bunch.

The second question of interest had to do with the number of people who were credited as being part of the internationalization initiative for Drupal 8. Having completed the final piece of the initiative – supporting translation of all configuration entities – the initiative's leader Gábor Hojtsy opened an issue to credit every single person who had been involved at one point or another. Which Alex Pott then scripted. Which subsequently crashed drupal.org for a few minutes. Well, this is what happens when you try to credit 1,661 people. Which, incidentally, was the correct answer. However, what most people remembered was the mentions of "more than 1,600 contributors" in issues, blog posts and tweets that bounced around at the time. Though Mr. Eaton informed the eager attendees that the judges would accept answers to the nearest ten, our motley crew could only count to 1,600. Ah well, next time.

"These are a few of my favorite things"

As always DrupalCon Baltimore was an excellent conference and I'm glad I got to go.

I'd like to thank the Drupal Association and the many, many volunteer organizers for running DrupalCon, the presenters and BOF leaders, Mediacurrent for providing the funding to let me attend, and my wonderful family who made the trip with me and did some sightseeing in Baltimore while I was geeking-it-up.

Damien McKenna Thu, 07/06/2017 - 14:09

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The Synergy of Search Engine Optimization and Web Accessibility

Mediacurrent Team — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 12:21:27 +0000

The Synergy of Search Engine Optimization and Web Accessibility

Search engine optimization and web accessibility are complementary processes. Focus on one and you likely positively affect the other without additional effort. First, let us define these terms:

Search Engine Optimization is making your site discoverable by search engines and ranking as high as possible for various keywords and phrases.

Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities.

On the surface, they may appear to be completely unrelated. Let us look at why that is not the case.

Overlap between SEO and Accessibility

Users with disabilities often need to access websites in different ways.

A person who is deaf cannot hear videos with audio or podcasts and needs to have captions and transcriptions in order to consume them.
A person who does not have the full use of his/her hands cannot use a mouse and must be able to click on a link or button with the keyboard or with additional assistive technology such as a sip and puff device or a switch.
And a person who is blind cannot use a mouse and cannot see the screen so must use screen reader software that reads a web page back to her.

What does this have to do with search engines? Well, Google has many of the same limitations in accessing sites as people with various disabilities do.

Google cannot hear the audio in a podcast or “watch” a video. It needs a text version in order to access the content. Google cannot click with a mouse. If a link or button or widget cannot be activated without a mouse, Google does not have access to it either. And if content is not in text format or marked up properly, Google cannot parse it. Essentially, you can consider Google to be a user who is blind, deaf, and mouseless.

In a nutshell, both SEO and web accessibility hinge on the ability to access a site’s content and make sense of the content through its structure and the relationship between the individual bits of content. Let us look at each of these:

Accessing a site’s content

Google recommends checking your site with a text browser like Lynx because it is about how search engines would see it.

In order for a search engine or user who is blind or deaf (and various other disabilities) to access a piece of content, it needs to be in text format. Embedding text in an image or video or putting the content in audio format makes it inaccessible. Google cannot parse and index it if it is not text the same way a user with a disability cannot hear or see the content to access it.

Making sense of content through its structure and relationship

Getting the content into text is a step in the right direction but another step is needed in order to make the content truly meaningful. The content must be marked-up properly. Imagine taking a web page that has a lovely visual display, copying the words out of it and throwing them in a Word doc without any layout or formatting. For example, take a look at this demo page. Here is what we would see:

This is the web page with visual layout and styling:

This is similar to what a search engine or person who is blind might get from the page if it were poorly marked up...one big blob of largely meaningless text:

It is difficult to make sense out of each piece of text. If I am looking for the concert date and ticket price of The Obelisks, how do I find it in that mess of text?

On the other hand, if the page were properly marked up, Google and the blind user would be able to discern what the main navigation is, what the topic of the page is, what the main content of the page is, what is superfluous information, what information the tables contain and what the contents of each cell in the table means. It is proper markup that gives search engines and screen readers the context they need to make sense of the text.

If the main menu is wrapped in a nav tag and contains a heading, this clearly communicates that the list of links is the main menu of the site. And as a blind user, I could easily click on the Tickets link in the main nav and expect to find the information I was after.

<nav>
 <h2>Main menu</h2>
 <ul>
   <li><a href=”#”>Home</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>News</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>Tickets</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>Survey</a></li>
 </ul>
</nav>

If headings are used properly, Google and the blind user can get a sense of the hierarchy of the page and what information is most important and how the bits of information relate to each other.
When the tables have a caption, their purposes are more clear and if the table rows and/or columns have headers, it is much easier to understand the contents of each cell. Here is a visual of what a screen reader user would have read to them when they bring up a list of tables on the page from our sample page:

They could then navigate around in the table cells and find the information they were looking for thanks to the properly labeled headers in the table. Google is also more likely to be able to make sense out of the data.

Benefits Beyond SEO and Accessibility

Accessible and SEO friendly sites also have additional benefits:

We can build sites that automatically rank better in searches just by paying attention to the markup we use, which also translates to a more accessible site.

Not only are sites easier to understand and use by search engines and users with disabilities, they are easier to use and understand by everyone! For example, users whose native language is not that of the site’s language, people with limited bandwidth connections, and people accessing the site on mobile devices all benefit.
Sites are also easier to consume in other formats. For example, having your phone read a website back to you while you are jogging or navigating a website while you are driving your car and interacting with the website via voice command - and touch and talking UIs are just the tip of the iceberg. More UIs are on the horizon in which people access your site in new ways. Building sites that are accessible and machine friendly makes it more likely that they will be compatible with those new ways.
Transcripts can be scanned faster than watching a video. This provides a better user experience which can translate into higher visit durations and more authority with Google. Transcripts and captions also help with on-page SEO by increasing density of targeted keywords and increase relevancy.
Accessible content also means better shareability on social networks. Sites become more meaningful and easier to parse for social networks.

SEO and Accessibility Techniques

So how do we make sites search engine friendly and accessible? Consider these techniques:

Technique	SEO	Accessibility
Follow W3C web standards. Validate your HTML. Validate your CSS. Validate your Feed.	Makes sites easier to parse.	Sites can be parsed more accurately.
Use semantic markup for structure and programmatic clarity of content. For example, <main>, <header>, <nav>, <footer>, <aside>, <cite>, <abbr>, <small>, <blockquote>, etc.	Makes sites easier to understand and gives context and relationship to content.	Makes sites easier to understand and gives context and relationship to content.
Set the page’s language in the html tag. For example: <html lang=”en-US”> This sets the language to U.S. English.	The page will be indexed based on this language,	Browsers can detect the language and offer to translate, and screen readers will read the text back in correct language with proper pronunciation.
Use unique page names in the <title> tag. Best practice is to list a unique page title followed by a separator and then name of the site.	Given a lot of importance in rankings and is what is used in the search engine listing. It can be customized to target specific keywords or queries.	What is shown in the page’s browser tab, and is the first thing read out by the screen reader to tell a user what page they are on.
Use headings to provide organization, structure, and relationships Use headings to denote the start of a new section (hide from visual display if necessary but keep available to screen readers).	Helps define page structure and relationship between content and makes page easier to understand and digest.	Defines programmatic start and ending of sections of a page and makes page easier to understand and digest. Also provides a way to navigate quickly around the site as screen reader users can bring up lists of headings and jump directly to the individual headings.
Use lists to properly mark up ordered and unordered lists of items.	Search engines see list items as related and sequential	User can bring up a list of links to get a sense of the page content and also to use to navigate around the page quickly.
Use alternative texts for images	Search engines can not “see” images and rely on the text version of the image to be conveyed in the image’s alt attribute.	Users with visual impairments can not always see the images and rely on the text version of the image to be conveyed in the image’s alt attribute.
Video with audio	Captions and audio descriptions make the video content indexable and the additional content can affect rankings.	Captions and audio descriptions make the video more consumable by users with hearing disabilities.
Audio alone	Transcriptions make the audio indexable and the additional content can affect rankings.	Transcriptions make audio files available to users with hearing disabilities.
Create readable and descriptive URLs	Search engines consider the url in their ranking algorithms. Make the URL readable and relevant to the page.	When other accessibility fails, the url can help a person determine the purpose of a link. For example if another site links to your site improperly (using “click here” or “read more”), the user may be able to determine the content of the page from the link url instead of the link text.

Summary

In summary, both SEO and web accessibility are closely intertwined when it comes to your site’s content and structure. Sites that are optimized for both factors opens the gates to a broader audience as they become easier to understand and use by search engines and users with disabilities. As new technologies are developed, this connectivity between SEO and accessibility will only increase, so it is important to take the steps necessary to make your site as accessible as possible.

Mediacurrent Team Thu, 01/26/2017 - 07:21

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Digital Strategy

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SEO

Web Accessibility

Webinar: International SEO + Drupal with Lingotek

Mediacurrent Team — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:15:53 +0000

Webinar: International SEO + Drupal with Lingotek

If you're a digital marketer, SEO is likely one of your many priorities. Since Google released "Mobilegeddon" last April, your primary focus may have shifted to mobile optimization - but have you noticed a struggle to successfully reach and engage with prospects from across the globe? If you target multiple countries and languages, your site needs to be optimized not just for Mobile SEO, but for International SEO as well.

Read this data sheet to learn more about how Mediacurrent and Lingotek can help you speak the right language to your global audience!

You'll learn:

Why International SEO is important in today's market
Tips for optimizing a global SEO strategy
Tools that can easily help you translate your site
And more!

Mediacurrent Team Wed, 10/19/2016 - 09:15

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How Drupal Won an SEO Game Without Really Trying

Jeff Diecks — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 12:23:59 +0000

How Drupal Won an SEO Game Without Really Trying

At Mediacurrent we architected and built a Drupal site for a department of a prominent U.S. university several years ago. As part of maintaining and supporting the site over the years, we have observed how well it has performed in search engine rankings, often outperforming other sites across campus built on other platforms.

The University's Goal: Win Search Rankings

The school boasts a popular athletics program with several nationally ranked teams. On Saturdays in the fall fans fill the football stadium and enjoy singing the school’s alma mater before and after games. The words are complex, so many fans Google for the words on their phones to sing along.

Mediacurrent’s client got a call from the athletic department one day, asking how their page could possibly top the big, important athletic department’s site in search rankings for the alma mater? Our client’s response: “I don’t know? Drupal?”

The athletic department tried a few of the usual SEO tricks but could never win in the rankings. Eventually, they surrendered, and now they simply promote the academic department’s site for the alma mater lyrics instead.

So, how did Drupal win this game?

There was no specific SEO focus to rank for this keyword. Instead, Mediacurrent leveraged several routine factors in a Drupal build process, and the end result is a site that wins ranking for branded and non-branded keywords across the campus, no expensive SEO tricks required:

1. Drupal by default is search engine friendly in many areas. This means that sites get a head start in the race just by choosing Drupal.

2. Mediacurrent and the client took measures in the architecture toward common-sense organization such as the URLs, breadcrumbs, and page titles all aligning and emphasizing keywords for the content of the page.

3. The excellent Metatag module, maintained by Mediacurrent’s Damien McKenna, further boosts relevant content in keyword rankings. The power of Metatag is that it allows content creators to control basic meta tags like page title and keywords, plus more advanced categorizations like Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Dublin Core, Google+, among many others. It's worth it to learn how to use Drupal's Metatag module the right way.

4. The site was also architected with a responsive, mobile-friendly design and WCAG Level AA accessibility compliance, further enhancing its search rankings.

Ways you can up your SEO game with Drupal

Individual victories like this example are nice, but to truly win more than just an individual keyword game, sites need to implement an overall plan for digital strategy. To get started on improving your site’s SEO, two recent videos from Mediacurrent’s Friday 5 series can help: 5 Tips for improving Drupal SEO and 5 Structured Data Items That Work for Every Website.

Jeff Diecks Thu, 08/18/2016 - 08:23

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Drupal

SEO

Metatag Module

5 Tips for Improving Your Drupal Site's SEO

Damien McKenna — Fri, 27 May 2016 13:22:06 +0000

5 Tips for Improving Your Drupal Site's SEO

We made it to the finish line of another busy work week!

Thanks for joining us for Episode 9 of The Mediacurrent Friday 5. This week, Community Lead Damien McKenna discusses 5 Tips for Improving Your Site's SEO.

He provides some great pointers on the following topics: Submodules, Configuration, Content types, Vocabularies, Users, Oh My!, The Front Page, and Most Important Meta Tags. Watch the video below to learn more.

Is there a topic that you'd like to learn more about? Send us your thoughts to Friday5@mediacurrent.com and stay tuned for Episode 10 in two weeks. Have a great weekend!

Additional Resources
How to Improve your Conversion Path Optimization | Blog Post
Mediacurrent's Crash Course in SEO and Drupal | Webinar
SEO Keyword Strategy | eBook

Damien McKenna Fri, 05/27/2016 - 09:22

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Video: Metatag 1.5

Damien McKenna — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 19:41:08 +0000

Video: Metatag 1.5

With meta tags still being important for search engine optimization and improving how content looks when shared via social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it's worth learning how to use Drupal's Metatag module the right way. Let me show you how a site can benefit from using meta tags, then find out about the latest improvements, along with recommendations on how to get it set up correctly for your site.

Additional Resources

Introducing Metatag 1.5 | Mediacurrent Blog Post
Top 10 Drupal Modules for Publishers | Mediacurrent Blog Post
Contrib Committee Status Review, April 2015 | Mediacurrent Blog Post

Damien McKenna Wed, 06/17/2015 - 15:41

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Much Ado About Mobilegeddon

Mediacurrent Team — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:52:44 +0000

Much Ado About Mobilegeddon

Unless you've been living under a marketing rock, you've heard all about Google's latest update that rolled out yesterday, quickly dubbed “Mobilegeddon” by the blogosphere. From now on, mobile friendly design will be a key component of mobile search rankings. This means that if your site isn't easily accessible across all screens, you could see a decline in rankings and, ultimately, web traffic.

2015 is projected to be the year that mobile search takes the top spot from traditional desktop/laptop, so this is great news for mobile-savvy consumers. However, as marketers we are always working to optimize our web presence, so this news could cause many of us to worry. The good news is that there are some easy ways to minimize the impact and make sure your Drupal website stays ranked high.

Responsive vs Mobile Version

Whether you have a responsive website or a mobile version of your website, this blog will help you improve your mobile rankings. That said, if your website isn’t mobile friendly at all or if you are in a position to decide between responsive or mobile versions, we wholeheartedly recommend responsive. Not only will it be easier for your content editors, responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern and is favored in search engine result pages.

Monitor your site

While it’s rumored that this update could affect up to 40% of websites, Google cautions that pages won't immediately lose rankings. Translation - don’t hit the panic button just yet. Instead, take a breath and take stock of your current performance across all screens and all devices. Use Google's Mobile Usability tool to test your site’s current mobile functionality and work with your developers to make sure you're using all resources available on your Drupal website. Combine this with your Google Analytics to establish a baseline for your page traffic, keyword rankings and your visitors’ behavior and typical traffic patterns. Like anything other test, let your data tell you the story. If you start to see dips or errors, take a critical look at your site across all screens and you'll likely find places that can be optimized.

Dive into Mobile SEO

We all know that traditional SEO works to optimize your pages for desired keywords and terms, so you’ll just need to take a few more steps to also optimize for mobile. Page speed is incredibly important for mobile SEO, so make sure all of your above the fold content loads in less than one second across all screens and that all of your content is playable on all devices. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool can help you gauge your current speed and offers tips for what you can do to improve it. For responsive designs, make sure you’re not using fixed size images. For mobile versions of your website, make sure your redirects are working properly.

One thing hasn’t changed: Content is still King

With any big algorithm change, we sometimes forget the basics. Remember that thought leadership is still the most important component of your website. If you're consistently producing relevant, useful content for your buyer personas, you’re still on the right path. Optimize your content for the small screen by using short, eye-catching headlines and clear calls to action throughout your copy.

These tips will help you keep your high mobile rankings that you’ve worked so hard for. If you do discover that you’re rankings are suffering - all hope is not lost! Google assures us that rankings will be updated frequently so if you make adjustments to improve mobile-friendliness, you’ll bounce back. In the meantime, don’t forget to check out our other resources to optimize your SEO rankings across the board.

Mediacurrent Team Wed, 04/22/2015 - 16:52

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