Perhaps the single most important feature that Drupal or CivicSpace offer for search engine optimization is the ability to create clean URLs. This feature alone is enough to warrant the switch from Mambo, and is probably the most important SEO option a true CMS can offer.
A "clean" URL is a simple URL...one without a lot of questions marks and long variable names. The problem is that content management systems like Drupal or CivicSpace use variable names to tell the system what content to display.
As I explained in my article on the importance of naming pages in search engine optimization, Google assigns a great deal of importance to how you name a page. If I create a page and Drupal calls it "node?=68", I'm not really doing much for my rankings (unless I want to be ranked for the word "node", I suppose). Worse, I'm risking alienating search engines completely, since some search engine spiders have a hard time following links that include any variables at all (though most can follow a link with just one variable, like in the example I used). So, if I've thought of a good name for my page that describes my content and targets the right keywords, how do I make my CMS use it instead of some variable-laden string of gibberish?
Drupal and CivicSpace solve this problem with a built-in option to rewrite a URL permanently. This lets me specify a page name along with my page title when I'm creating a page of content, right in the same content creation form. The implementation is very elegant, and extremely practical.
To enable this, log in to your site with an Admin user ID and click on "Administer" and then "Settings". Scroll down till you see an option to enable or disable "clean URLs" ...set this to "enabled". That's it...when you next edit or create a page of content, you should see a field to add the page name included in the form.
It baffles me that this option isn't turned on by default in Drupal, though it may be for some CivicSpace installations. This is the single most useful search engine optimization feature Drupal offers as a CMS, and one that you have to either pay for with Mambo (it comes as an addon package) or do without. Enabling this feature and using it wisely is definitely one of the key ingredients of a successful Drupal SEO strategy.
Hint: To use page names with more than one word, use hyphens between words. For example, instead of trying to use "Installing Drupal" I would use "Installing-Drupal"...spaces can cause problems with some webservers, and Drupal may not accept a page title that includes spaces.
