Useful tips when adding pages to a Drupal website

Creating pages in Drupal is pretty easy, but there are a few things that you might not be aware of, and reading these tips may help you avoid some of the mistakes that I have made in the past.

• Always turn the Tinymce editor off if you intend to paste text that you copied from a website or from a word processor. The reason for this is that copying and pasting often picks up tags of html that were invisible to you, and if you paste it straight into the page while Tinymce is on, that html will be placed in your page. Sometimes this doesn’t hurt anything, but sometimes it can create absolute chaos. There is a really easy way to avoid problems here. Just click the link under the Body field that says “disable rich text.” Disabling rich text lets you see the html view directly, and if you paste text into a page that is in the html view, no hidden tags will be pasted with it. After you paste your text you can easily turn Tinymce back on by clicking enable rich text.
• Make sure you aren’t promoting pages to the front page if that’s not what you intend to do. Some Drupal websites are set up so that the content on the front page is dependent upon which pages are promoted to the front page. If your site is set up this way you need to be careful to check the publish settings of your page before you submit it. This may not seem like a big deal, but there are some pages that should never be placed on the front page. The safest choice is to make sure each content type is set so that it is not promoted to the front page by default. I set up all sites that I build like this.
• Choose the title of your page so that it contains the essential key words that you would like to get listed in the search engines. When the path auto module is enabled the title of your document will also be used as the URL of the page. For even better ranking you can also change the URL path settings so that the URL will contain even more keywords. Don’t go overboard though. Google isn’t stupid. They don’t give you more credit for repeating key words over and over again.
• Remember to use taxonomy whenever possible. Taxonomy sounds scary, but all taxonomy really is is the categorization system for Drupal. Sometimes you have to create some content before you start getting a picture of how you are going to categorize your articles, but the sooner you learn how to use it, and the better you organize your categories the better. Taxonomy is extremely useful for creating list of related pages, and for some kinds of user interaction a strong categorization system is absolutely essential.
• If the first paragraph of your text does not contain the key words that you would like to see show up in the search engines be sure to fill in the description for the page under “meta tags”. The description tag is the text that shows up under the Google searches as the snippet of text that describes the site. This text should be readable. Loading a description with tons of incoherent key words won’t make people want to click on your site, and it won’t help you with Google either.
• If you are creating an important page, create it in a text editor or a word processor first. Things can go wrong on the web. Your internet might get disconnected; the server might have an error; it happens. Creating your text in a separate document won’t protect your content from everything, but it helps, and it generally lowers the chances of spelling errors making it to the public eye.
• Remember to hit submit. I think this one is self explanatory.