A web developer is a professional in charge of designing, developing, and maintaining websites. In other terms, a web developer specializes in creating the World Web (WWW) applications using the client-server model. However, the duty of a web developer is not limited to creating websites; it is a lot more than that.
Along with incorporating the appropriate set of features in a website, web developers need to take proactive measures to make sure that the end users will adopt it. And Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those proactive measures that web developers need to implement.
For every web developer, employing SEO techniques while creating a website or web application is essential to make sure that it ranks at the top positions in search engines.
If you are a beginner and want to get aware of which SEO techniques help your website perform better in search engine rankings, this article is for you.
In this blog post, we will cover some of the most effective and trending SEO techniques that every web developer should implement while developing web applications. For those who are not familiar with SEO, we will first walk through a brief introduction to SEO and its need.
So, let us get started!
What is SEO, and Why Do You Need it?
Search Engine Optimization is the full form of SEO. It is a practice of improving your website’s visibility in search engines. This means that when people search for products and services related to your business, your website should appear in the top positions in search results. The more the visibility of your website in search results, the higher the number of customers your website attracts.
To have a more clear idea of SEO, let us take an example. Consider that you run a business of lipsticks and have an online presence where you sell them. Now, consider that a user wants to buy a lipstick and enters the same keyword in the browser’s search bar.
The search engine decides which web pages to display in the top 10 results. It displays those web pages that provide the user with the content they want. It is the magic of SEO algorithms that will help your website’s web pages to appear in the top results of search engines.
Search engine algorithms store the data of each web page. When the user enters the keyword, SEO algorithms decide which web pages have content close to the user's search query and display them in search results. And the primary purpose of SEO is to convince SEO algorithms that your web page includes the most relevant content the user is searching for.
This is the reason why SEO plays a crucial role in website development. As a developer, it will be your responsibility to manage SEO’s technical aspects, which include code changes and some tweaks for optimization.
What Do Developers Need to Know About SEO?
Now that you know what SEO is, let us move on to 8 must-know SEO best practices for web developers.
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Add Relevant HTML Meta Tags
There are search engine crawlers that look at a web page’s HTML tags to determine what type of content it serves. These HTML tags are the SEO title and SEO description.
Before moving to the SEO title and SEO description, it is important to understand the term ‘keywords’ first.
What is a Keyword?
A keyword is a phrase that users enter in the search bar of a browser. Based on the keyword, the search engine provides relevant results. So, if you want the search engine to display your web page in the top results, you first need to identify the keywords the users often enter to search for content analogous to what you provide.
Your web page’s title tag and H1 tag are the best tags to place the identified keywords. Also, using keywords in H2, other heading, and paragraphs is a good practice. However, you need to be mindful of not overusing the keywords. Overusing keywords implies an attempt to mislead the ranking algorithms. Also, they may penalize you for this misleading.
Let us move towards the title and meta description tags.
Title Tag
In the title tag, placing the keyword at the beginning of the title is a good SEO practice. However, it even works well if you use the keyword anywhere in the title. In addition, make sure to maintain the length of the title within 60 characters, including symbols and spaces. A title, not more than 60 characters, is considered an optimized and ideal one.
Meta Description Tag
This tag requires you to provide a short description of what the web page is all about. The search engine displays this description on the search engine results page so that readers get an idea of what content the web page includes. It should be so appealing that it compels the readers to visit the web page.
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Robots.txt File and Robots Meta Tags
A robot.txt file is a series of instructions that instructs search engine crawlers which URLs they can access on your website. So, using the robot.txt file, you can instruct the crawlers on pages that they should not access by mentioning them in the file.
Generally, not allowing crawlers to access a particular web page is a practice to avoid overwhelming the web app’s server with the crawlers’ requests. However, doing this is advisable only if lowering the number of requests to the server has an impact on the web page’s performance.
Moreover, you can prevent crawlers from accessing unimportant pages of your web application. When you specify a particular web page in the robot.txt file, Google or other search engines will not index it. However, if another web page links to the page that you prevented from being indexed on a search engine, it may still get indexed.
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Follow and Nofollow Links
Usually, when a crawler visits a web page, it crawls all the linked web pages inside it. These are called follow links.
However, there might be a situation where you may want to prevent the crawler from not crawling a specific linked web page from the web page it visits. In such a case, you can provide the value of the rel attribute as nofollow. The links inside the webpage that you don’t want the crawler to crawl are nofollow links.
In short, follow links are ones that help improve the page rank of a web page to which they are linked. On the flip side, nofollow links do not have any contribution to improving the page range of web pages in which they are present.
Since 2020, Google has announced that nofollow is simply a hint and not a rule. This means that you can simply hint at Google by using nofollow that you don’t want it to crawl the linked web pages. However, the decision entirely depends on Google.
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Page Load Speed
One of the factors that improve the user experience is the page load speed. The page load speed is the time the web page takes to load in a browser. Google has made the page load speed the ranking factor in its ranking algorithm. The increased page load speed of your web page helped it rank in the Google search results.
People are more likely to visit web pages that load their content faster. So, you need to pay attention to improving the load time of your web page. Make sure to reduce the load time to display the content on the web page that holds visitors’ attention. Meanwhile, the rest of the content will load in the background. Doing this will make it feel to visitors that your web page loads faster.
The following are some of the best practices you can follow to increase the page load speed:
- Optimize Image Sizes.
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Lower the number of redirects
- Take the benefit of browser caching, lazy loading, and Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP).
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Mobile Friendliness
Mobile-friendliness is yet another factor that Google has included in its ranking algorithm. The reason is most online content is adopting the mobile-first approach. Also, mobile devices account for 58.99% of the total global website traffic as of the second quarter of 2022.
A website that is mobile-friendly provides users with an amazing experience on mobile devices.
With the increasing usage of mobile devices, it becomes necessary for you to transform your web application into a format that it serves mobile users. The following are the three primary approaches to making your web app mobile-friendly:
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Use a Responsive Design
There would not be a great impact on your codebase when you try to convert your current web design into a responsive one. To make your website design responsive, you can tweak CSS so that your website fits best for devices of all screen sizes. In addition to this, set new viewport meta tags.
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Use a Dynamic Design
Implementing dynamic design is pretty complex and requires more effort than responsive design. A website with a dynamic design first identifies the user-agent type, whether it is a mobile user or desktop user, requesting the content, and then serves the HTML content to them. So, a dynamic design serves different rendered HTML content to mobile and desktop users, which is why it is tricky to implement.
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Use a Mobile Subdomain
To make your website mobile-friendly, you can opt to use a separate mobile subdomain for mobile users. For example, let us say your website is www.text.com. The subdomain for mobile users will be simply mobile.text.com or m.text.com.
However, this approach is not advisable for small and medium-sized websites as it requires a lot of effort and time for implementation.
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Leverage the Correct Redirect
Websites evolve constantly. Content on web pages gets updates, pages move, new elements get added, and many more. To make sure all these happen swiftly without any glitches, web developers are responsible for it.
All the aforementioned activities are important because end users require something new from the website over time.; obviously, updated content is one of those aspects. So, everything web developers do to websites, they do for end users.
However, they also should take care of the way the crawlers view their websites. And this is where the role of redirects comes into play in SEO. Redirects 301 and 302 are the most important ones that have an impact on SEO.
301 Redirects: This redirect tells search engines that a specific web page or website is removed permanently. In this case, search engines transfer most of the link equity of the original page to the new one.
302 Redirects: This redirect tells search engines that a specific page has been removed temporarily. It comes in handy when you are updating or redesigning your website and still wish to maintain the link equity of the original page.
As a result, using redirects can do wonders for your website in a matter of SEO.
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Add a Sitemap
It is obvious that search engines do not experience websites as humans do. They require web developers to provide them with hints on how different web pages link together. To do so, a sitemap is one of the approaches.
Whenever your site gets indexed, bots see every link on your website and check whether it goes. When you add a sitemap, the process the bot performs to check every link on your website becomes pretty easy.
When you use good internal linking on your website, search engines are able to crawl your entire website. This becomes pretty complex in terms of large websites. However, sitemaps make things easier for search engines to crawl your entire website.
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Implement Structured Data
Sometimes, search engines display the result in different formats. For instance, let us say you enter ‘chocolate cake recipes’ on Google, and the search result page displays the results in special cards with links to different pages, as seen in the below image.
Search engines, like Google, leverage the structured data provided on a web page to display the results in a special format like the above one. It is the role of web developers to manage structured data well. They should be able to format a web page so that it becomes easy for humans as well as search engines to read everything on it.
Conclusion
For almost all website owners, the primary goal is to increase organic traffic, and SEO helps in doing so. Though SEO might seem like something outside a web developer’s duties, we hope this blog post has convinced you that web developers should have sound knowledge of SEO to deliver SEO-friendly websites.
The above are some of the best SEO practices that every web developer should follow in order to make websites visible on the top positions of the search result page. Besides the ones mentioned above, there are many other technical factors that play a vital role in ranking algorithms.
Frequently Asked Questions
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With what type of SEO are web developers associated?
Web developers are generally associated with technical SEO, which involves how search engine bots index and crawl websites.
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Do web developers need to know about SEO?
Yes, it is highly recommended that web developers should be familiar with the basics of SEO and some best SEO practices that help improve the website's ranking in search results.
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Why is SEO important in web designing?
SEO ensures that your website works smoothly, is easy for visitors to navigate, and provides information the visitors are looking for.
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What is the role of an SEO developer?
An SEO developer is in charge of performing actions on websites that improve their search ranking and organic traffic.
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What is SEO software development?
SEO software development refers to the process of developing applications that are optimized for search engines and rankings.
