Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

One of the key functionalities a Drupal website manager needs is the ability to quickly and efficiently update unique meta-tag content for Drupal pages (note: pages of content in Drupal are often referred to as "nodes").

The NodeWords module for Drupal adds this functionality seamlessly, allowing content creators to input their own text for meta-tags. It even allows administrative control over which tags are made available to content creators, which ones will be created automatically, and how to generate automatic tags.

Since the key to having your pages tagged correctly in search engines is unique, accurate meta tagging, this module is invaluable.

Installing node-words was easy. I downloaded the file from the Drupal.org link above, and unzipped it to a folder on my computer's hard drive (I used Zip Genius to unzip the downloaded file...feel free to use the unzip utility of your choice).

Then, the all-important step: I read the read-me file. In this case, there weren't any surprises...it gave me a brief overview of the features the module adds, and instructed me to follow the usual procedure for a Drupal module install:

1. Upload the .module file to the Drupal modules directory on the webserver. In this case, it was a file called nodewords.module. To get to the right folder on my webserver, I used the FireFTP extension for Mozilla's Firefox, so I could FTP directly from my browser. I typed in the ftp information to access my webserver, and then clicked on my "public_html" folder to get to my publicly viewable files (this could also be called "www" on your webserver, instead of public_html). This is the root folder for the site...in other words, this is what shows up when you just type in my domain name. Since Drupal is installed at the root level (meaning my Drupal install shows up when you type in this domain name) I just had to find the folder here that's called "modules" and click to open it, and then transfer my nodewords.module file there.

2. Like many other modules, this one doesn't require any changes or additions to the database, so there's no need to mess with MySQL code.

3. Visit the admin mod panel and enable the module. I did this by clicking on the "administer" link in my navigation menu, and then on the "modules" link. I scrolled down till I found my new Node Words module, and checked the box next to it to enable it.

4. Visit the mod settings. Though this mod already works, as soon as it's enabled, there were some settings I wanted to see and, perhaps, tweak, so I clicked on "administer" and then "settings" and then "node words" ...a new menu item which showed up once I had "enabled" the mod in the previous step. Here, I found I could define "global" keywords that get inserted after your page-specific keywords. Best not to over-use this function, of course...the more generic and ubiquitous your keywords, the less they count for anything, and the more they could hurt you if it looks like you're spamming. I also found other options related to how the mod works.

And that's pretty much all there is to it. NodeWords is a very well-written mod that does exactly what is required for meta keyword insertion in Drupal.