A Complete SEO Guide for Web Developers

What Do We Mean by SEO for Website Developers?

While developing a digital marketing strategy, you cannot leave SEO behind. It involves several methods and tactics that business people use to improve the visibility of their company website on top search engines like Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.

For website developers, SEO means learning efficient coding for each web page. So, if you want to work with any search engine to get relevant clients to your website, it is necessary to know the fundamentals of SEO.

For this, we have come up with this quick SEO guide for web developers-

A quick SEO checklist for web developers!

Going through the following SEO checklist for web developers will help you achieve productive results at the end of your campaign.

- Write visitor-friendly URLs 🔗

You must note that URLs will be effective only when they are descriptive, concise, and easily readable. Both users and search engines appreciate this quality, and thus it will be a brilliant idea to make the most out of it.

To write bot-friendly URLs, you can follow the steps below-

• Add keywords: If the keywords fit naturally in the URLs, add them without hesitation. However, be careful about using too many keywords. Also, the URL must not belong.
• Use a single domain and subdomain: Sometimes, using a subdomain delivers mixed results. So, sticking with a single domain will be a good idea, wherever it is possible.
• Use hyphens: If you need to separate words in the URLs, use hyphens instead of spaces.
• Remove unsafe characters: Characters like carats, spaces, and tildes can affect your website’s traffic. So, it will be better to avoid them.

- Know Your Redirects 🔄

You may need to move and shift content on your website, and that is why it is important to know your redirects. While there are several redirect types, the most common two types are 301 and 302 redirects.

• 301 redirects: You can use this type when you have to move a page to another place or help users go to an original page while removing duplicate content. 301 redirects improve the SEO value on the destination page, which stops individual web pages from competing against each other on search engines. It, in turn, helps a website rank higher on SERPs. 301 redirects are often called ‘temporary redirects’.
• 302 redirects: If your site’s address is changed or a page becomes unavailable, you have to use this redirect. While the pages do not transfer or retain their SEO value, any previously-earned links can guide visitors to visit your new website. Another name for 302 redirects is ‘permanent redirect’.### - Consider Your Site Tags 🏷️

Site tags will help users and search engines understand the context of your page. So, it will be necessary to know how you can use them effectively.

The two most important tags include title tags and meta description tags. These are nothing but the first lines of contact between a search engine user and your website. They will likely click if they find the tags relevant to their query.

On the other hand, using duplicate tags on multiple pages affects website traffic. The reason is that it makes search engines confused about determining the intended destination page.

For URLs, make sure the tags are as concise as possible. You must use proper keywords, brand mentions, and actionable language so that users and search engines can easily understand what they will see after visiting your website.

- Check the robots.txt File 🤖

The job of the robots.txt file is to set rules for how web crawlers should crawl different parts of a website. Even though it is a small code, its impact can be significant.

As a developer, you must check whether a robots.txt file blocks web crawlers from crawling your website because it can be harmful to your SEO.

Sometimes, developers use robots.txt file when they want to stop a page from being crawled. Sometimes, a page expected to get a lot of traffic does not get it. In that case, a rogue robots.txt file can be the main culprit.

- Understand and Implement Structured Data 🗃️

Understanding structured data is found to be a little challenging for many SEO people. But, if you successfully get the point right, there is a chance to make immense progress.

As a professional developer, you know very well how to format a page to deliver smooth flow and high readability.

If you can use structured data properly, Google will quickly know exactly what is present on every web page. Not only that, but structured data can also help Google understand what questions your website is answering.

- Staging Site Domain Check ☑️

When the development process is on, a staging site is created to test new code, fix any major issues before the website goes public, and test previous site versions.

A common mistake made by most developers is not checking the staging site domain while preparing for the site launch.

But if you run this check, you will be able to remove errors, including images not loading correctly and 404 errors.

- Correct Common HTML Errors ⌨️

Typical HTML errors can result in the poor rendering of the website on a variety of platforms, eventually leading to poor site speed and user experience. These things will affect your site performance and its ranking on a search engine page result.

Though HTML errors do not directly impact the site’s search engine ranking, there may be an indirect impact, the same as what happens when you do not use W3C valid code.

W3C validation is used to check the code of a website to find out whether it follows the specific formatting standards. If you cannot validate all the web pages according to those standards, you will not receive the desired traffic.

Using better coding techniques also helps search engines understand any site more easily.