So let’s say your company has a new product launching. You need to promote the new brand on your Drupal website. What are some SEO tips for promoting your brand while the paint is still wet? Together, let’s walk through some SEO steps to promote your new brand online.
1. Expand the page title
The first place to look on your website is to create new pages, (or find existing content) that belong to the brand. Once you have done that, we will begin with recommendations for page titles.
The page title is the most important location for keywords for SEO. For example, if we are promoting a new apple farm, we could make the page title say something like, “Scrumptious Apple Farm in Washington State: Over 20 varieties of delicious apples.”
Page titles should not be too long though. “Scrumptious Apple Farm: Over 20 varieties of fantastically delicious apples. Family owned and grown in Washington State,” is on the long side of things.
2. Leave only one H1 tag on the page and put other titles in H2, H3 etc.
Your page should only have one H1 tag. The H1 tag is the second most important location on the page to have keywords. However, people commonly use multiple H1 tags on a page and that is a mistake. This is a guess, but it is very likely in our opinion that Google will invalidate this.
We say "very likely" because no one outside of Google really knows how their algorithm works. (And if someone claims to know, they are quacking...) But we do know that if you try to overload a page with keywords using multiple tags where only one is allowed, Google may penalize your site.
Also watch out for empty H1 tags entered into a WYSIWYG. This is also a bad thing to do.
For the main title, and subtitles on a page, choose one to be the H1 tag and then all others should fall within H2, H3 and so on… For example:
H1: Over twenty varieties at Covenant Apple Farm
H2: Responsible and sustainable farming in Washington State
H3: New! Pick your own Bushel in the Autumn
3. Add ALT tags to all images uploaded
Our next recommendation for SEO best practice, is to add ALT tags to all images on the site. In principle, ALT is what is used by screen readers of if the images cannot be downloaded, and the TITLE is what you see when you hover your mouse over the image.
The TITLE tag is less frequently used by search engines, but it does not hurt either. So we recommend that you copy and paste whatever you added as ALT text.
4. Improve the description meta tag
In this next step, check the meta tags on the page. We have full control of the description meta tag and need to maximize that ability. For Drupal sites, you should already have the Drupal Metatag module installed: https://www.drupal.org/project/metatag
If the content page is new, it is likely that the default value for Description ias [node:summary]. Normally, Google will just use the same first two paragraphs of content here.
Usually that's okay, but if your site uses uses Drupal Paragraphs, this will actually be empty! If your site uses Drupal Paragraphs, change the page description to match our first two paragraphs of content. Then, if you click on View Source you will see <meta name="description" content="Awesome content here” />
The Description MetaTag is what Google will use as the description in the search results. If you go back to you marketing team and find out they would prefer something else, you can easily change the meta tag description. Edit the page and click on the Meta Tags just below the page URL path setting in Drupal to make your changes.
5. Install advanced meta tags
Another option is to use advanced meta tags. This includes Open Graph, Facebook's custom meta tags, Twitter Cards, etc. It can be helpful for SEO and should not take very long to install and enable on your Drupal website.
6. Update XML Sitemap
Install the XML Sitemap module as a helpful tool to build site maps that stay updated over time. But also check to be sure our site’s new pages have been indexed and submitted to search engines.
Remember that you can weight pages by importance. To give a small boost to a certain page, you can change the priority from 0.5 to 0.9. It is important, however, to keep the homepage of your site the highest at 1.0. After these changes, you will need to rebuild the sitemap and re-submit it to Google and Bing.
7. Get control of the existing directory listings, social media accounts and the domain
Now let's look at the Google search results. Do a search using the name of your new brand and see what kind of existing results you are getting for an organic search using the name of your new brand.
You will also need to get your hands on the domain name that matches the brand. That’s a big deal. Many companies wisely choose brand names around available domain names.
If there are social media or map hits, claim them if possible and add links back to your site.
8. Share the link to the site on as many reputable websites as possible
Finally we get to the core of what we know about how Google search works: Reputable external links to your site matter.
Your page rank is high if you have many other high ranking sites linking to it. So, you should have other sites link back to our page on as many other quality, reputable websites as possible.
You can do this by showing the links in the press releases you might share, posing it to relevant forums, adding social media with links to your pages, and posting links on other people’s blog comments. Then your links may get noticed and other people will place links in their websites and blog posts, too.
You can even create a Wikipedia page, add your site to reputable business directories, and share the site in our email signatures.
Google will ignore most of these, but one person will share and then another...some portal picks up the press release, someone pastes everything in a blog or a forum, a business advertises that they work with your company... and after a while a presence is established!
