Businesses and professionals would like to maximize their return on investment (ROI) when they hire a web developer for their websites. To maximize the number of leads and orders which are generated by their website, they would like to ensure that the website ranks well in the popular search engines for relevant keywords. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) while developing the website can improve the website ranking to a great extent. Hence some relevant SEO tips for web developers are listed below.
– Understand the search process: Before doing any SEO, the developer should have a good understanding of how internet users search for the information they want. They will usually enter the keywords which they feel are relevant and then click on the first few results in the search engine. If they cannot access the information quickly or face other problems, they will move to the next search result.
– Website load time: It is important to ensure that the website will load quickly since most search engines have stated that load time is an important factor for website ranking. Hence the website design should be optimized, to reduce the file size, and images. Users are likely to spend more time on websites that load quickly
– Responsive design: increasingly users are using various devices like tablets, desktops, laptops, and smartphones for accessing websites, and the screen size will differ greatly on these devices, so the website should have a responsive design so that it can be read easily on any device.
– Mobile optimization: The number of people accessing the website using smartphones has increased, and more than half the users use mobiles for internet access. So the website should be designed so that it is easily viewable on both mobile, desktop, and laptop
– Meta description: The meta description is first read by the search engine bot while classifying the pages. So, the meta description, and title should be relevant to the website content. It should have at least 20-25 words including the keyword
– Sitemap and robots.txt: Providing a sitemap will help the search engine bots easily find the information on the website and include it in the search results. The robots.txt file can also be used to indicate pages that should not be crawled.
– URLs: The website should have user-friendly URLs which are concise, describe, and include keywords. They should be hyphenated so that they can be easily read.
– Use redirects properly: 301 redirect is permanent and all the website links are permanently moved. 302 is a temporary redirect of a web page used when some temporary changes are being made. The redirects should be used correctly
– High-quality content: The website content should be relevant to the keyword being searched. Additionally Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and other relevant terms can be used so that the website has a featured snippet in search engines
– Audit: Audit the website to check if it conforms with the search engine guidelines using the many tools available, some of these tools are provided by the search engines for free. Specifically, the website should have an SSL certificate for greater security.