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Useful SEO Basics for Web Developers – What Should You Know?

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Years ago, the SEO team stuff page with targeted keywords and ranked higher on Search Engine result pages, but things are completely changed. Today, SEO success depends on various processes, including User Experience, Secure and Accessible Websites, Code Development, Page load time, and other technical things. So, creating a successful website with a compelling user experience requires work from both the development and SEO teams.

This post will examine some of the technical aspects of SEO and why a developer should be aware of them.

But wait! Do You Know What SEO is?

The term “SEO” (search engine optimization) refers to raising the ranking and visibility of your website in Google, Bing, and other search engines when users look for services or products that are relevant to your business/website.

SEO Basics for Developers

Below are the few technical aspects developer should know.

Website Security

We must take website security seriously since hackers are trying to damage websites. If your website gets hacked, you lose control, negatively affecting both search engine rankings and user experience.

Search engines only promote user-safe websites with robust HTTPS encryption. Google declared that robust HTTPS encryption will be a ranking factor in August 2014. Therefore, using strong HTTPS encryption to secure your website is recommended.

 

URLs

Always use short, concise, and keyword-rich URLs that clearly convey the content of a web page. URLs that are user-centered and don’t contain query strings or other crawl-intensive URLs are known as SEO-friendly. Clean URLs perform better in search engine result pages (SERP), appear more trustworthy, and simplify sharing.

For example, if you’re looking for information regarding laptops, a URL like “https://www.websitename.com/laptop” will help you decide to click on that link.

A URL like “https://www. websitename.com/index.php?id_vca=24321&?clcp11oct” does not clearly explain the destination page.

Responsive Website/ Mobile friendliness

Because it is a ranking factor in both Google and Bing’s algorithms, responsive/mobile friendliness is essential for SEO. If a user searches on a mobile device and your website is mobile-friendly, it will appear higher on the mobile search results page than on non-mobile social sites.

Website Speed

Search engines like Bing and Google seek to direct users to websites that load quickly and provide the best user experience because fast sites provide pleasant user experiences to visitors.

Search engines give fast-loading websites more weight than those that take longer to load. Your page will rank higher in search results the faster it loads.

Website Speed is measured by the time it takes for a page to load after a user clicks on the link on a search engine results page.

To gauge load times, Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights.

Robots.txt File

This simple text file must be at the root of your website (https://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt) to tell Google & other search engine crawlers what they should crawl & should not crawl.

(A web crawler is a bot operated by search engines like Google and Bing to index the content of websites to populate results on search engine results pages.)

HTML Tags

HTML tags improve a website’s search engine and user exposure. You can use various HTML tags to enhance your website’s SEO.

List of a few essential HTML tags for SEO

  • Meta Title Tags
  • Meta Description
  • Heading Tags (H1-H6)
  • Alt Attribute
  • Canonical Tag
  • Robots Meta Tag

Conclusion

At present, SEO success is dependent on the above-mentioned technical SEO aspects (Only a few are mentioned), and great teamwork from the Development and SEO team can go a long way toward successful SEO deliverables and performance.

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Vinesh Patil

Vinesh works as a Technical Consultant at Perficient in the Nagpur GDC, India. He's passionate about learning new changes and expanding his knowledge in the digital marketing field.

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