Drupal SEO and Traffic Related tips and Tricks

13. Once you have your drupal website up and running, you need to do someSearch engine optimization. Even if you have already done SEO, this article will give you some new insights and pointers and help you increase your website traffic and SERPS. Drupal is very strong in SEO that is why I am still hooked on to it.  Top Drupal SEO Modules, Tips and Tricks to increase traffic
14. Social bookmarking and sharing helps bring traffic to your site and increases SERPs.  I have myself struggled with many different modules, kept changing and finally learnt few good ones which does the trick. Check this page to decide what you should be using >> Best Drupal Sharing and Social bookmarking module reviews
15. Twitter integration can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. The reason is twitter has lots of features and you may want to seamlessly integrate with twitter. Depending upon your needs you will either pick up a module or you will write a small HTML or PHP snippet. Check this page for Drupal and Twitter integration ( Posting , Tweeting, Pulling )
16. URL Alias and Auto Aliasing is achieved using  PathAuto , But what about the old aliases you have created? It will show up as duplicate content on your website and Search engines will hate that.  Use Redirecttogether with PathAuto Module and you will get a good SEO Friendly site J.

When using PathAuto module it is very important that the uniqueness of the URLs is maintained, else it will be seen as duplicate content by search engines. You can add date to avoid this problem.

Drupal Troubleshooting related tips and tricks

11. White screen of death ( Completely blank page)

Occasionally a site user or developer will navigate to a page and suddenly the page content disappears, and is completely blank. No content. No errors. Nothing. This often, but not always, happens after updating a module, theme, or Drupal core. This is what is referred to by most members of the Drupal community as the White Screen of Death or WSOD. There are several reasons why this might occur, and therefore several possible solutions to the issue.  Check this page for more infohttp://drupal.org/node/158043

12. Not sure what to do use “Flush Cache Function”

Drupal has a caches for all your content so whenever a page is requested, it doesn’t have to generate it dynamically all of the time (quering the database), it can pull it up from cache. This speeds up the website as it reduces the amount of PHP processes and SQL queries being made.

Whenever you see that your site acts strangely or your changes to themes are not reflecting, you must Flush Cache. Flushing your cache clears out your Drupal cache and allows the site to rebuild itself with up-to-date information. Click on the left most icon on your Administration menu to invoke Flush Cache related functions.

Drupal Moderation and Administration related tips and tricks

5. Controlling spams, Cleaning up , Purges etc.

Drupal is best used for community websites. But if you keep community website open for users to post content or comments, you will only end up seeing loads of spam. Spam is dangerous if not cleaned since if you use Adsense account,  your account may be disabled, since spam post may violate adsense guidelines.   First you must know how to control spam, read this post  Stopping spam in Drupal – Users, Posts, Comments, Next you must know how to manage after the fact, meaning after your website has been spammed, for that check this post    5 drupal modules to Purge users, Clean-up Spammers and Spam posts

6. Flagging content - To further control Spam and take help from your forum or website members use Flag Abuse module.  provides default abuse flags for nodes, comments and users and gives an administrative interface for reviewing and resetting said flags

7. Regular Drupal housekeeping

Keeping the website free from junk and removing old and unwanted  posts is also very important.  We often get stuck because there is not bulk method to do this effectively. Even if you want to purge users or comments, we have to struggle finding the right modules to do that. Check this post for solution Deleting / Purging Cache, Users, Nodes, Comments (Housekeeping)

8. For plain simple mass deletions, without much options, check out this page

9. Backing up your website - If you are a new to drupal then you MUST take backups before making any major changes or installing major modules so that you can restore the original in case things screw up. During my early years, I myself have wasted several precious hours since I did not take the backup and had to  work several hours to restore the site. Use  Backup & Migrate module that helps making this task

10. Installing Themes and modules in the right directories

This causes issues later on, when you have to upgrade the drupal to next version . Follow the directory structure recommended, that way it will be easy to debug.

/<Your drupal-root >
  /includes
  /misc

  /modules      <-- core modules here
  /profiles
  /scripts
  /sites
    /all
      /modules  <-- contributed modules here

Drupal Configuration related tips

1. Customize Error Pages of your website.

Drupal gives a default error  when a  user  navigates to a web page that they don’t have permission to view or a page that is not found. This is okay but not useful enough for users. To better manage your 403 and 404 pages you can create your own pages and mention the URLs of those pages here..

http://<website URL>/admin/settings/error-reporting

Further you can also use http://drupal.org/project/logintobogganmodule to show login block on access denied pages. This works well for community websites.              

2. Speeding up database tables

If you have a large website with lot of database reads, DB maintenancemodule will optimize the administrator-selected tables in the database during regular cron.php executions. For MyISAM tables, OPTIMIZE TABLE repairs a table if it has deleted or split rows, sorts table indexes, and updates table statistics. For BDB and InnoDB, OPTIMIZE rebuilds the table. Note, MySQL locks tables during the time OPTIMIZE TABLE is running. Optionally the user can select to attempt a REPAIR TABLE in the event errors are found during attempted OPTIMIZE TABLE. If you enable this ensure you have proper working backups.

OPTIMIZE works best on tables with large deletions (e.g. cache or watchdog), however MySQL will reuse old record positions, therefore in most setups, OPTIMIZE TABLE is unnecessary unless you just like defragmenting. The Overhead column in phpMyAdmin's database view is the most common way to determine the need of an OPTIMIZE TABLE query. It essentially shows the amount of disk space you would recover by running an optimize/defragmentation query.

Think of OPTIMIZE TABLE like defragmenting your hard drive. Sure your system will run without it, and it might even be fast, but isn't it nice to run a defrag when you can?

3. If you have not done the overall optimization and want to learn how you can speed up and optimize your drupal website read all about it here. This article has simple things like configuration changes to using some modules. How to Speed up and Optimize Drupal 7

4. WYSIWYG Editor is there a better option ?

You should add a WYSIWYG editor to your drupal website. Contributed module a WYSIWYG editor has all the functionality and integrations with popular editors.  You will have to use IMCE along with WYSIWYG editor for image support.

If you are looking for a fastest and light weight WYSIWYG Editor for Drupal,  Then Whizzwyg is the answer. Fastest and smallest WYSIWYG Editor but features rich.

In old days there was no proper module to have WYSIWYG editor on your drupal webite. There were many options available , in case you don’t want to use WYSIWYG editor