10 SEO Basics Every Website Development Must Know
It's more efficient if developers understand the basics and incorporate it into construction and website maintenance. To avoid rework later on, check out 10 SEO basics that web developers must know and discuss with a panel of SEO experts and developers.
1. Safety
Search engines are very important to website security. Make sure you have the wrong SSL. This is the starting point. In addition, the necessary safeguards should be in place to ensure that the site does not allow injection and manipulation of content. Hacking at any level can damage the user experience and the trust signals of users and search engines. But when you use any plugin. When adding extensions or tools to secure your website, be mindful of the speed of your website.
2. Response code
The server response code is very important. There are usually some ways to present the page to the user, and a unique UX design will facilitate some creative development. There are 200 server codes on the page. Get and update XX or 4XX codes. If you don't need the redirect, remove it.
3. Redirect
Speaking of redirects, they are a key part of the website migration and launch process, from an old site to a new one. At least implement a redirect if nothing else is being done during startup. We're talking about 301 redirecting the most relevant topic pages on the new site to make sure all URLs are on the old site. If you're simplifying and updating your content structure, it could be a 1:1 of old site and new site pages or many-to-one. Don't trust the page rendering and assume it's fine, like the server code above. Use a tool to verify that the redirect is a 301.
4. botrotstx
SEO is meaningless if a website cannot be indexed and shown in search results. Don't turn ideas into robots.txt files afterwards. Sometimes the default command is too open and restrictive in other cases. Know the contents of robots.txt and don't blindly push staging files into production to avoid checking.
Some sites with heavy migration and launch plans suffered setbacks due to the ban on all temporary orders (preventing dev sites from being indexed) being pushed to live sites. Also, consider stopping low-value items like tabbed pages, CMS-created variants, etc. If you can't stop pages from being generated, at least prevent them from being indexed, you usually have a lot of low-value garbage to think about.
5. Location map
XML sitemaps are our chance to ensure search engines understand all of our pages. Don't waste resources and opportunities to make images. Unimportant pages and stuff that shouldn't be prioritized and indexed. Make sure the 200 server code is displayed on all pages listed on the XML sitemap. Keep them clean, no 404. Redirects and any non-target pages.
6. URL
Good URLs are concise and include page subject, lowercase, no words, spaces or underscores. In navigation and site structure, we like to see subfolders and the URL structure of web pages.
7. Mobile friendly
That doesn't mean it's ideal for search engines to work or look good in the browser. Searching for mobile friendliness is critical. Verify using Baidu mobile friendly tools. Make sure it passes. In addition, the content of the mobile version should also be considered. Search 1000's using a mobile-first index. This means they are viewing the mobile version on the site.
If you hide important content in the mobile version that you want search engines to take into account for the user experience, or don't show it then you risk losing what you know search engines see.
8. Website Speed
But the most important thing is to make sure your website is indexed, website speed is important, page loading and website loading can hurt user experience and conversion rates, and also have an impact on SEO performance, there is no way to optimize website speed.
It really depends on you having an optimized hosting environment, compressing and minifying JS and CSS, controlling image size, keeping code lightweight, using plugins or extensions is wise. Code, files and risks may cause performance changes or instability.
In order to control the content, put in place any safeguards, no 10MB images can be uploaded and occupy the page. Or plugin updates can't detect how to slow down. continuous baseline. Monitor and improve site speed. web.dev or Lighthouse is the developer's favorite development tool for the Google Chrome browser.
9. Title tags
Title tags are important clues for search engines. They are not CSS shortcuts, but content. Link your CSS to them, but in the order that matters. Don't set the first largest page title as H1 and also don't set the subtitle as H5, there are many comments on the impact or not on SEO performance. Try to implement a literal hierarchy and usage, try to use other CSS as much as possible.
Only have one H1 on a page if you can. Use your SEO resources to understand the overall planning of title and page content.
10. Content Management and Dynamic Content
Implementing the most effective SEO strategy can limit CMS functionality. Knowing the content planning and needs of a website gives content creators control over their needs without breaking site speed or any SEO page elements.
To keep everything stable, save time, protect your site and code like markup. XML sitemap generation. redirection etc.
The intersection and collaboration of SEO professionals and web developers is very important. SEO relies on best practices for technical SEO like on-page project enterprise development. Developers who understand the basics of SEO can greatly aid successful collaboration and SEO performance, increase website development efficiency, and reduce rework or "SEO-specific" updates and requests.