Drupal front page meta tags

Drupal front page meta tags FAQ: How do I get meta tags to show up on the front page of my Drupal website?

After converting my website about living in Alaska to Drupal several months ago, I just realized that I made a mistake on the Drupal front page configuration, and forgot to specify any meta tags on the Drupal front page(!). Looking at it again now, front page meta tags aren't a really obvious configuration setting in Drupal, so I thought I'd briefly describe how to fix this problem.

(Drupal 7 Note: As of April, 2011, there is not a meta tags module for Drupal 7. See my Drupal 7 meta tags module notes for more information.

Drupal front page meta tags

First, if you haven't installed the Drupal Nodewords module, do it. If you're at all concerned about SEO for your Drupal website, the Nodewords module is a must, at least with Drupal 6.x and earlier Drupal versions.

Next, if your website happens to be named OneMansAlaska.com, to set your Drupal front page meta tags, navigate to a URL like this:

http://www.onemansalaska.com/admin/content/nodewords

On this page, click the "Default and specific meta tags" link, and then click the "Front Page" link. As you'll see on the resulting page, you can now set your Drupal front page meta tags, including the meta description and meta keywords tags.

Drupal meta tags: One other Drupal front page meta tags approach

There is one other way to set your Drupal front page meta tags, but I really can't recommend it. As mentioned, if you're at all interested in SEO for your Drupal website, you need to install the Nodewords module. But, if for some reason that doesn't work for you, here's the other approach:

• Copy your Drupal page.tpl.php page to front-page.tpl.php.
• Manually add the meta tags you want to that new file.
• Make sure you always keep that file in sync with your normal page.tpl.php file.

One caveat here: I haven't tested this approach, I just typed that from memory. As I think about this problem, if you've heavily customized your Drupal front page, you've probably created this file already, so you may just need to add the meta tags to a file that already exists, so ... sorry, I'm not putting any more time into this solution at the moment. (If I have the name of that file wrong, feel free to let me know.)