Optimizing a Drupal site for search engines like Google is a peice of cake. But not too many people take this into account. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) doesn't only help other people find you easier but also makes your page more easily acessible by the search engine crawlers.

In Drupal there are some great modules for acheiving higher rankings and more search friendly pages. I will list some handy modules and how you get the most out of them. 

1. Pathauto

Download and install this module. It will automatically transform your URLs and its done, but however there are some other great things we can do with this module.

Under URL aliases>Automated alias settings you will find a great number of options that you can tweak to categorize your content. If you have a lot of different content types, specify a name for each of them.

Example:

If you would like to categorize your content according to Taxonomy:

This makes it easier for the search engine to find out the subject of your content but it also makes it more appealing to visitors.

Unicode Characters in URL

I would be careful with Unicode characters in my URLs, I've noted several times that the crawlers have som problems with crawling them.

To disable unicode characters in your URL you will need to get under URL aliases>Automated alias settings>General settings and enable the Transliterate prior to creating alias option. You will also need to rename the file called i18n-ascii.example.txt to i18n-ascii.txt. In that file you can edit what characters should be transliterated as well.

2. Nodewords (Meta tags)

Editing meta tags have been considered as not to be as important as it once was. But I think it still is a factor that should be mentioned. Adding a good meta desription of your pages does matter to the user when it scrolls through the result pages in a search engine. Some exerpts of your page done by Googles algorithm can be very wrong and inaccurate.

With this module you can edit META Keywords, Description and other sitewide META Tags.

One feature is useful is that you are able to add meta tags to your Views.

Other techniques

Hierarchy

To make your content more accessible you should practice a hierarchy model that doesnt create any pages that lies more than 3 clicks away.

The old model for showing content on your page is simply known as the Pyramid model. The model makes you navigate after menu>submenu>category>subject etc. This makes it hard for your users to find your content and spreads the power of your backlinks all over your site rendering it less powerful. 

However building a site that is as flat as possible is the solutions to this. You can call the technique the Landscape model. You should post you most relevant content on your frontpage making it easily accessed. In Drupal this method is best achieved by making a View with links to your latest content and putting it in a block or just simply having the default setting of posting nodes to your frontpage.

I think Drupal is a great CMS for creating sites made for SEO. You can customize almost everything and create advanced sites not knowing a single bit of PHP and only basic HTML.