Boost your website traffic with one simple piece of code

25 februari, 2010 - 18:14 Joris Snoek

Ever wanted to boost your site traffic with not that much effort?

Well, after reading The 7 Harsh Realities of SEO I came up with an idea: a very fast way to implement this in Drupal: "All I did was make the post title the title tag and the first sentence of each blog post the meta description."

As I was reading this article, I thought: "This shouldn't be that hard in Drupal". Without making a module but with a quick fix, here is howto:

Add the following code in your theme's template.php

/**
 * Override or insert PHPTemplate variables into the templates.
 */
function YOURTHEME_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
    //Get taxonomy tags from current node.
    foreach ($variables['node']->taxonomy as $tid => $tag){
      $tags .= ', ' .$tag->name;
 
    //Strip body text; strip tags & and set max length  
    $varText = check_plain(strip_tags($variables['node']->body));
    $description = check_plain(substr($varText, 0, 154));
    $tagshead = check_plain($tags);
 
    //Fill the $head variable
   //Edit 'Lucius' to own company or something
    $variables['head'] = drupal_set_html_head(
       '<meta name="keywords" content="Lucius, '. $tagshead.'" />
       <meta name="description" content="'.$description.'" />
       <meta name="title" content="'.drupal_get_title().'" />
    );
   }
}

This code will:

Add your tags to keywords meta-tag
Add your page title to title meta-tag
Add first 154 characters of your body-text to description meta-tag

NOTE

This is a very quick fix, it doesn't work with for example the module nodewords. To do it clean, you have to produce a module and test around with other Drupal seo modules.
Maybe, if we have some time left here at Lucius HQ, we'll provide a module. Hit me on Twitter if you'd like that! And maybe there allready is a module that provides this light weighted, nodewords partly allready does the trick. Please let me know on Twitter. Comments should also be here soon :-)

Lucius BV: open source concept en realisatie