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You know the struggle… you only need those four or five tickets to take care and it would mean a lot to your SEO goals for the month.
But how do you onboard your web developers?
How can you help them understand the urgency of your SEO needs when they have so many other competing priorities on their plate?
Fifteen years ago, I could do about 90% of my SEO work for a given client myself.
Those days are over. SEO now relies on content creation, UX, code development, IT, multiple layers/levels of approval and more.
I’ve written many times about how SEO can’t be done in a silo, and I’m glad that it’s a discipline that now focuses more on alignment to create a quality experience for website visitors.
Throughout my career, there has always been a need for support from web developers.
This meant going down the hall at my agency or working with a third-party developer hired or hired by my clients.
In any case, getting buy-in and support from web development is critical to SEO.
Even better is when developers understand the principles of SEO.
It is much more efficient if developers know the basics and take them into account in their builds and site maintenance, avoiding any further rework.
Check out the 10 must-know SEO basics for web developers and also some focus group discussions with my teams of SEO specialists and developers.
1. Security
Website security is important to search engines.
Make sure you have an SSL in place and without any errors.
This is the starting point.
Beyond that, having the necessary safeguards in place to ensure that the site does not have vulnerabilities that allow injection, manipulated content, etc.
Being hacked at any level hurts the user experience and trust signals for users and search engines.
However, keep site speed in mind (more on that later) when securing your site with any plugin, extension, or tool.
2. Response codes
Server response codes are important.
There are often ways to get a page to display for a user and unique UX designs that prompt some creative development implementations.
Regardless, make sure the pages represent 200 server codes.
Source and update any 3xx or 4xx code. If you don’t need redirects, remove them.
3. Redirections
Speaking of redirects, they are a critical part of the website migration and launch process from an old site to a new one.
If you do nothing else in your launch process, at least implement redirects.
We’re talking about making sure all URLs on the old site have a 301 redirect to the most relevant topic page on the new site.
This could be 1:1 from an old site to new pages or many to one if you are streamlining and updating your content structure.
As with the server codes above, don’t trust that a page is being rendered and assume it’s fine.
Use tools to validate that redirects are 301.
4. Robots.txt
Nothing matters in SEO if the site cannot be indexed and displayed in search results.
Don’t let your robots.txt file be an afterthought.
Sometimes the default commands are too open and in other cases too restrictive.
Know what’s in robots.txt.
Don’t blindly push the staging file to production without checking it.
Several sites with big migration and release plans have been frustrated by a ban on all staging commands (to prevent the development site from being indexed) that was sent to the live site.
Also, consider blocking low-value elements such as tag pages, comment pages, and any other variations your CMS creates.
You’ll usually have to account for a lot of low-value junk, and if you can’t prevent the pages from being generated, at least block them from being indexed.
5. Site maps
XML sitemaps are our opportunity to ensure that all of our pages are known to search engines.
Don’t waste resources and opportunities leaving images, insignificant pages, and things that shouldn’t be prioritized for focus and indexing.
Ensure that all pages listed in the XML sitemaps represent a server code of 200.
Keep them clean and free of 404s, redirects, and anything other than the landing page.
6. URL
Good URLs are concise, include words relevant to the page’s topic, are in lowercase, and contain no characters, spaces, or underscores.
I love seeing a URL structure of subfolders and pages that match the content hierarchy in the navigation and site structure.
Three levels down?
Then “example.com/level-1/level-2/topical-page”.
7. Mobile Friendly
Again, remember that just because something works or looks good in a browser doesn’t mean it’s ideal for a search engine.
Mobile compatibility is important for search.
Validate it with Google’s mobile friendly tool.
Make sure it happens.
Beyond that, think about the content that is rendered on the mobile version.
Google uses “mobile first” indexing.
This means they are looking at the mobile version of the site.
If you hide or don’t show important content that you want search engines to consider in the mobile version for UX considerations, think twice and know that content may be missing from what Google sees.
8. Site Speed
This is number eight on the list, but possibly the most important after making sure your site can be indexed.
Site speed is important.
Slow page loads and sites hurt UX and conversion rates.
They also have an impact on SEO performance.
There is no single set of ways to optimize site speed.
It really comes down to keeping your code light, being careful when using plugins or extensions, having an optimized hosting environment, compressing and minifying JS and CSS, and keeping image sizes in check.
Any code, files, and aspects that may cause performance changes or instability are a risk.
It includes any protection for content management controls so that a 10 MB image cannot be loaded and a page closed. Or a plugin update goes unnoticed in how it slows things down.
Base, monitor and improve site speed on an ongoing basis.
My lead developer’s favorite tool is web.dev or lighthouse in the Google Chrome browser development tools.
9. Heading Tags
Heading tags are great context clues for search engines.
Note that these are for content and not for CSS shortcuts.
Yes, bind your CSS to them, but keep them in order of importance.
Don’t have the first largest page heading as H5 and subheadings on a page as H1.
There is a lot of commentary about the impact (or not) of headings on SEO performance.
I won’t go into that in this article.
Be as literal as you can on the hierarchy and how they are used.
Use them where you can instead of other CSS.
Have only one H1 on a page if you can.
Work with your SEO resources to understand the layout of your headings and overall page content.
10. Content management and dynamic content
As noted above, CMS functionality can spoil the best development implementations.
Be smart about the control you give.
It understands the content plan and ongoing site needs so content creators have the control they want and need, but can’t alter site speed or any of the on-page SEO elements.
Having so many dynamic aspects like tagging, XML sitemap generation, redirects and more can save you time and secure your site and code to keep everything stable.
conclusion
The intersection and collaboration between SEO professionals and web developers is important.
SEO is based on best practices for technical SEO and other things like business scale of page elements.
Developers who understand the basics of SEO can go a long way toward successful collaboration and SEO performance.
In addition, it can make website development work more efficient and the need for less re-work or “SEO-specific” updates and requests.
More resources:
Featured image: baranq/Shutterstock
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