In the past I have been an amature SEO guy at best, but this is all going to change. I have been attempting to cement my SEO abilities by making the popular open-source content managment system, Drupal, bend unto my will.
There are a number of modules that have to / should be installed in order to get SEO’d pages, but there are also a bunch that should be disabled as well. For instance, for a really fast page load, you’re not going to want a bunch of features community stuff like user login, comments etc.
Also, you really nead to install the phptemplate engine in order to take full control over the tagging of your pages. They don’t give you much to go on in the handbook for this module, and the code they start you out with is atrocious. You’ll open page.tpl.php to find that the default code has very poor indentation, and very few comments.
"But wait," you say, "You should be able to identify what each <?php print …?> tag is saying without comments." And you’re right I could but why? It is hell-of hard to sort through that mushed together code. I don’t like it, and neither does your mother. Perhaps the strangest thing is that there are a few lines that are commented, like <!–footer–> and <!–start(and end) main content–>.
I think the hardest thing about page.tpl.php to begin with is that it looks like garbage when you open it in a color coding editor like Dreamweaver 8.0, (which I am busy trashing in other blog entries.) So, in order to make life easier for myself, I edited page.tpl.php to include some comments and have proper indentation.
Note, this is the phptemplate that came with version 1.0 by Adrian Rossouw. If this blog entry is very old, you may want to check to ensure that you have downloaded the phptemplate 1.0.
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