Note: this is for a fresh installation of Drupal.

First thing you want to do is make sure that you have the.htaccess that comes with Drupal’s archived download. Sometimes i find extraction programs ignore hidden files on Linux. if you find it is missing, open the archived file and extract just that specific file and upload it to your server. Now that you have the default .htaccess for Drupal you should have the ability to enable clean URLs by navigating to Home > Administer > Site configuration > Clean URLs.

Now we want to enable the Path module that comes with Drupal by default. navigate to Administer > Site building > Modules and check mark Path and then the Save Configuration button.

Download, install and enable the Pathauto, Global Redirect, Nodewords, Page Title and Token modules.

To configure Autopath navigate to Administer > Site builder > URL aliases and select Automated aliase settings. Under Update Action select Do nothing.

To configure Nodewords navigate to Administer > Content management > Meta tags and check mark “Use the node teaser if the description meta tag is not set”
underneath Node teaser options.

Now modify your .htaccess

# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the ‘www.’ prefix,
# (http://example.com/… will be redirected to http://www.example.com/…)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Uncomment RewriteCond and replace example with your website (replace .com if you have a different TLD such as .net). Uncomment RewriteRule and replace example.com to reflect your website.

Because search Drupal by default has the home page point to /node it is best to create a custom homepage for better indexing by websites. To do this first create a new page titled Home with desired content. Now navigate to Administer > Site configuration > Site information. Underneath Default front page: replace node with your home page node tag (e.g. home-page).