One of the key factors in your search engine optimization strategy is referrers. Referrers are the websites that are sending users to your site.
If all of your website visitors visit your site by typing in your homepage's URL directly, then your only referrer is yourself. However, if that were the case, you wouldn't need to optimize Drupal for the search engines at all.
The truth is, for most websites, users come from a variety of places. A very great majority of them will probably be arriving from the search engines, for a well-optimized site (According to Forrester Research in July, 2000, over 80 percent of Internet users reached websites through search engines), while others will be following links from other sites, clicking on your signature link from your forum posts, or following content from your site syndicated to other sites. If you have an online advertising campaign, some of your traffic might be following banner links or text ads to your site.
To be able to devise any kind of optimization strategy, you need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Specifically, you need to know how people are finding you online. For example, if I see that a great many visitors to this site are finding me on Google, it makes sense for me to note which keywords I'm ranked highly for. If I'm getting a lot of visitors looking for "Drupal SEO", then I know articles like this one are probably going to be well-received. On the other hand, my logs might tell me that I'm not receiving traffic in some other areas I might be trying to optimize for, or they might surprise me and tell me visitors are coming to my site from searches for other content.
Drupal (and CivicSpace) make it easy to develop a basic search engine optimization strategy with a built-in referrer logging system. To enable referrer logging from within Drupal or CivicSpace, log in with an Admin user ID and then click on "Administer" and then "Modules". Scroll down and find the "statistics" module and click in the check box to enable it (this may already be enabled in your Drupal installation...if so, leave it alone, since your log should already be working). Then scroll to the bottom and click on "Save Configuration".
You should now be able to see your logs by clicking on "Administer" and then on "Logs". Wait a couple of days so some traffic hits your site, and then check back in that section to get an idea of where it's coming from. Drupal logs tell you your top referrers, and tell you which Google keywords your visitors were searching for when they found you...enough information to begin planning a search engine optimization campaign, or to gather feedback on your existing search engine efforts.
