The role of a web developer doesn’t end at designing and developing a website. In addition to crafting an aesthetically pleasing, fully-functional website, they also need to make sure that users will embrace it and it performs well on search engine rankings (more key roles in this “what is a web developer” guide). This is where SEO comes into play. SEO is an ever-changing field and web developers hold the key to optimising a website for on-page and technical SEO. This is why web developers need to grasp fundamental SEO techniques to contribute to their website’s overall success.
Here’s how web developers can code pages more efficiently with respect to SEO.
Make sure your URLs are User-Friendly
Even though a URL is the first thing people see on a page, it is often overlooked. The most effective URLs are concise, easy to read, offer context as to what the page is about, contain relevant keywords and use hyphens instead of underscores or spaces to separate different words in URL. These traits are preferred by both your users as well as the search engines, which is why it goes a long way to customise your URL paths. In order to ensure bot-friendly URL structures, developers need to add primary keywords at the start of the URL.
However, refrain from cramming your URL with too many keywords or it will appear spammy. Not to mention, it is prudent to use a single domain wherever possible, instead of using subdomains. Also, remember that short URLs work better, so keep your URLs short when possible. Last but not the least, it is best to avoid unsafe characters, such as carats and spaces, since they hinder bots from properly crawling your site.
Optimise the Title tags and Meta Description Tags
Search engine crawlers look at HTML tags, especially the title and description tags, on a web page to identify the type of content on the page. This is why it is important to optimise these tags with the relevant keywords. Make sure to include your primary keyword at the beginning, but if it isn’t possible, you can also use it inside the title.
Also make sure to keep your title tag from under 60 characters, including all special characters. As for your description tags that appear on the SERPs to give some context about what the page contains, make sure to pen down a compelling description that entices users to click. However, since algorithms don’t consider description tags as an important factor for ranking, it is advised not to spend too much effort optimising this tag.
Enhance the user Experience
Page load speed
Increasing the page load speed helps you provide a better user experience to your users. Not only that, Google algorithm uses the page load speed as an important ranking factor, so the faster your page loads, the higher up you appear on the SERPs. Use a tool like Google’s Lighthouse to measure the performance of your site under different network connections to see what an actual user may experience on your site.
There are numerous ways to increase the load speed of your website, such as minimising redirects, compressing your images, relying on browser caching, using code splitting and tree-shaking, and leveraging Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page. As a developer, you can also cache your pages on the server, improve server response time, remove render-blocking JavaScript, serve static pages as much as possible, and use lazy loading. You can also use the Google Webmaster tools to analyze all your web pages and see if there are any problems that need fixing.
Make your website Mobile responsive
Since most web users are shifting to mobile, Google has taken a strict mobile-first approach and integrated mobile-friendliness into its ranking algorithm. Therefore, it is prudent to make your website mobile-friendly to enhance the experience for mobile users. The best way to achieve mobile-friendliness is to make your website responsive, making sure it is functional and aesthetically pleasing on devices of all sizes and resolutions, including logo design ideas that work on all devices.
A responsive layout will keep the users hooked, rather than when they have to zoom all the time because your page isn’t responsive. Going responsive is often the best way to achieve mobile friendliness since it doesn’t affect your existing codebase. Another way is to use a dynamic design and serve differently rendered pages for mobile and desktop users. This method is also effective yet time-intensive.
Ensure Accessibility
Even though a lot of developers don’t pay much heed to accessibility, making your website accessible to people with disabilities help you rank higher on Google. There’s a lot you can do to enhance accessibility on your website, such as using an appropriate color contrast ratio, using alt attributes for all images, making all clickable things easier to see, making all buttons and links conspicuous, leveraging semantic HTML tags, etc.
Fix all Redirect Issues
Moving and shifting content on a website can lead to redirect issues. Things like temporary redirects, redirect chains, and meta refreshes can wreak havoc on your SEO, which is why website developers need to know their redirects. Temporary directs are used to divert users from one URL to another, for instance when you have changed the URL or a page is no longer available. These redirects don’t hold much value for Google and offer no link equity to the page. On the other hand, redirect chains redirect one page to another page, which in turn redirects to another. The issue is that each redirection takes a few seconds, and you lose link equity at every redirect. So, in a long chain redirect, Google crawlers don’t bother to reach the destination. This spells badly for your page because it fails to index, and in turn, rank.
Pay Attention to Technical SEO
In order to make sure that your site can be indexed and crawled, you need to work on a few factors. For instance, you need to ensure that your website has consistent protocols; either relative paths or absolute paths, but not both. Second, you need to work on your XML Sitemap which is akin to a table of contents for your website. Your XML map makes it easier for Google to crawl your website. You should also create a robots.txt at the root of your website to provide instructions to the search engines what they should crawl and which parts of the site they should not index. Similarly, you should also Enable SSL (https) on your website to make people feel safe on your website and enhance their user experience.
Read More: 5 SEO Tips To Grow Your Business 2022
