Knowing the basics of SEO can make it easier to collaborate and improve your SEO performance. Here’s what you should know as a developer.
You’re familiar with the struggle. All you need to do is take care of these four or five tickets, and your monthly SEO goals will be significantly enhanced.
How do you convince web developers to join your team?
What can you do to support them understand the urgency and importance of your SEO needs when there are so many competing priorities?
Fifteen years ago, I was able to do 90% of the SEO work for any given client.
These days are long gone. SEO today relies on content creation and UX, code, IT, and various levels/levels approvals.
I’ve written numerous times about SEO being impossible to do in a silo. Now, it’s a discipline that focuses on alignment for providing a quality experience for website users.
My career has been filled with the need to support web developers.
This meant that I had to go down the hall at my agency or work with a third-party developer contracted by or employed for my clients.
SEO is dependent on web development support and buy-in.
Developers should have a good understanding of SEO principles.
Developers should be familiar with the basics to incorporate them into their designs and site maintenance. This will save time and avoid any need for rework later.
You can find the top 10 SEO tips for web developers here. I also have focus groups with my SEO developers and SEO specialists.
1. Security
Search engines consider website security necessary.
You should ensure that you have an SSL installed and working correctly.
This is the beginning.
You must also ensure that the site is secure from any vulnerabilities that could allow for injections, manipulations, and other attacks.
Hacking can cause severe damage to user experience, trust signals, and search engine results.
Remember site speed when using plugins, extensions, or tools to secure your site.
2. Response codes
It is essential to know the server response codes.
There are many ways to get a page rendered for a user. Unique UX designs can also be used that will prompt creative dev implementations.
However, ensure pages render 200 server codes.
Any 3xx and 4xx codes must be updated. You don’t have to use redirects.
3. Redirects
Redirects are an essential part of the website launch and migration process from an older site to a newer one.
Implement redirects if you haven’t done anything else during your launch process.
It’s about making sure URLs from the old website have a 301 redirect that takes them to the similar page on the new website.
If you update and stream your content structure, this could be one too many pages from an old site.
As with the server codes, you shouldn’t assume that a page is rendering correctly.
You can verify that redirects are 301s using tools.
4. Robots.txt
SEO is meaningless if the site doesn’t get indexed or shown in search results.
Do not let robots.txt files become an afterthought.
Sometimes, default commands can be too flexible or too restrictive.
Find out what is in robots.txt.
Do not blindly move the staging file to production.
Many sites that had great migration plans and launch plans were thwarted by the disallow of all commands for staging. This was done to prevent the dev site from being indexed.
Consider also blocking low-value items such as comments pages and tag pages.
It is common to have to deal with a lot of low-value junk. If you cannot stop the pages from generating, block them from indexing.
5. Sitemaps
XML sitemaps allow us to make sure search engines know all pages.
Do not waste time and resources by allowing images, insignificant pages, and other things to be ignored for indexing and focus.
Ensure that all pages in XML sitemaps display a 200 server code.
Please make sure they are clean and clear of 404s, redirects, and other things that don’t belong on the destination page.
6. URLs
Good URLs are short, concise, contain words relevant to the page’s topic matter, are lower-case, and do not include characters, spaces, or underscores.
I WOULD LOVE TO SEE a URL structure with sub-folder pages and a content hierarchy that matches the site and navigation structure.
Three levels down?
Then “example.com/level-1/level-2/topical-page.”
7. Mobile Friendly
Remember that something looks great in a browser does not mean it will work well with a search engine.
Search engines must be mobile-friendly.
It can be validated using Google’s mobile-friendly tool.
It must pass.
Think about the content that is rendered in the mobile version.
Google uses “mobile-first” indexing.
This means that they are viewing the mobile version.
It would help if you thought twice about hiding or not rendering the content you want search engines to consider for UX considerations in the mobile version.
8. Site Speed
This is the eighth on the list, but it’s probably the most important.
Site speed is crucial.
Sites that load slowly and cause slow conversion rates.
They can also impact SEO performance.
There are many ways to optimize site speed.
It all comes down to code being light, using extensions or plugins sparingly, optimizing your hosting environment, compressing and minimizing JS and CSS, keeping image sizes under control, and ensuring you have the right tools.
Any code, files, or aspects that could cause instability or performance shifts are dangerous.
You should include safeguards to prevent a 10MB file from being uploaded. This will help protect your page. A plugin update can slow down the site without being noticed.
Site speed can be monitored, improved, and baselined on an ongoing basis.
My favorite tool for the web. dev and Lighthouse are the Google Chrome browser development tools.
9. Heading Tags
Search engines love context clues like heading tags.
These shortcuts are not for CSS.
You can tie your CSS to them but order them according to importance.
You don’t need the H5 page heading or subheadings.
Many people have commented on the effect of headings on SEO performance.
This article is not about me going there.
Be as exact as possible in the hierarchy and their usage.
This CSS can be used where they are needed instead of other CSS.
If you are able, only one H1 should be on a page.
To understand the overall plan for headings, and on-page content, work with your SEO experts.
10.Content Management & Dynamic Content
CMS functionality, as mentioned above, can cause problems in the most effective dev implementations.
You must be careful about how much control you give.
Understanding the site’s content needs and content plan will allow content creators to have the control they need but not slow down the site or interfere with the SEO on-page elements.
Having as many dynamic elements as possible, such as tagging, XML Sitemap Generation, and redirects, can help you save time and protect your site.
