Making your information searchable is important since it allows more relevant visitors to read it. This is known as search engine optimization (SEO), and it might result in more interested individuals visiting your website. If Google Search has difficulty comprehending your website, you may be missing out on a significant source of visitors. A visually appealing and well-designed website is essential for both web developers and company owners. The primary aim of any website, however, is to generate visitors from qualified business leads. We’ve created our own checklist of the most important items to consider throughout the development stage.
- Basics of HTML
Websites are seen differently by robots (Google and other search engines) and human users. Robots can view what is meant for human users thanks to HTML optimization. One of the advantages of HTML is that, unlike other programming languages such as Java, it can be read and understood by web spiders.
- Sitemaps
A sitemap is an XML file on your website that informs search engine indexers how frequently your pages change. This data is read by search engines in order for them to crawl your site more intelligently. Pay notice if your site has a vast archive of content pages that are isolated or poorly linked. If your website has a search form or filters, you may frequently only access the results pages through this form. In most cases, there are no connections to these pages. Add links to page results to sitemap if you think they are essential and want search engines to index them.
- Best practices for URL
URLs are not something that developers should take for granted. Well-structured URLs are crucial for SEO since they provide the robot crawler with a clear explanation of the site’s hierarchy.
- Ensure that your URLs can be read by your users so that they can comprehend what the website is about.
- Keywords are good, but don’t go overboard with them.
- Since they pursue a particular way of rendering, use dashes or underscores as word separators rather than spaces.
- Promptness of the site
Site speed is a major ranking factor in Google search rankings. The speed of your website is critical to improving the user experience. As a result, Google favours sites with faster loading times. For instance, Google’s PageSpeed Tool is a fantastic tool for developers to evaluate their site speed and get Google’s recommendations on how to make your page load quicker. They also offer field data reports that demonstrate how your page performance compares to other pages in their index over the previous 30 days.
What can you do to speed up the page?
- Enable file compression (preferably while keeping the quality)
- Reduce redirection by minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
- Remove JavaScript that is rendering-blocking.
- Improve server response speeds by utilising browser caching.
- Make use of a content distribution network.
- Image optimization
- Canonicalization
A canonical link is an HTML feature that assists webmasters in avoiding duplicate content problems. There are times when the same material is accessible on a website via many links. If you already know that some pages might be related to other categories, you can address this throughout the development stage. For instance, on an ecommerce site, items may be shown in a variety of categories. Duplicate content on your website has a negative impact on ranking since search engines don’t know which version to rank for search results. The answer to this problem is to use the rel=”canonical” link element to designate all duplicate pages.
- Checking out the robots.txt file
A robots.txt file includes search engine instructions. You may use it to prohibit search engines from indexing particular portions of your website and to provide search engines with useful recommendations on how to crawl your website more effectively. The robots.txt file is very important in SEO.
Let’s look at an illustration to know better:
You own an eCommerce website, and visitors can easily browse through your items by using a filter. This filter creates pages that essentially display the same material as other pages. This is convenient for people, but it confuses search engines since it generates duplicate material.
You don’t want search engines indexing these restricted sites and wasting time on these blocked URLs. As a result, Disallow rules should be configured to prevent search engines from viewing these filtered product pages. Avoiding duplicate material may also be accomplished by the use of the canonical URL or the meta robots tag, but they do not address the issue of allowing search engines to explore just relevant pages.
The use of a canonical URL or a meta robots tag does not prohibit search engines from indexing these sites. It will only prohibit search engines from including certain pages in their results. Because search engines only have a limited amount of time to scan a website, this time should be spent on pages that you want to appear in search engines.
- Understanding and Implementing Structured Data
Structured data might be challenging for many SEO professionals and here is where developers can truly shine. Structured data, when utilised correctly, helps Google to understand exactly what is on each portion of a web page. It can also inform Google exactly what queries you’re answering. In reality, the typical questions below employ a structured data structuring scheme (scheme) to convey to Google that we are answering commonly requested queries.
- Try to maintain to keep your code clean
Web developers can accomplish a lot of amazing things, but it’s best to keep things simple most of the time.
Consumers place a higher value on convenience than practically anything else. We desire easy access to information, and anything that gets in the way ruins the user experience. Additional complex coding might cause more stumbling blocks for site visitors.
One of the first stages in SEO for developers is to keep their code clean. When users land on a website, they make rapid judgments about whether it’s worth their time.
At Innovidesign Labs, we will help you to ensure that your impressive development work gets the “web traffic” it deserves.