11 Must-Know SEO Basics For Web Developers

A well-designed website is important for any business looking to succeed online, but if your website has no chance of ranking well in search, few people will see it. Just keep in mind its basic SEO principles and good content development practices to keep your website from being hard for search engines to use.

Why is it important for web developers to understand the basics of SEO?

Most of the time, web developers are only interested in making their website work properly. But if he keeps ignoring the factors that affect SEO during web development, they will pile up and they will not be able to rank his website. Also, after completion, it becomes very difficult to track where and how many errors were made. For the entire web development process to be effective, it is imperative that web developers leverage the basics of SEO from the start. The website should be developed with her SEO in mind, and the basic structure of SEO should be set up from where web development begins. This allows your website to better adapt to your SEO needs and allows SEO professionals to work harder to stay ahead of the competition, saving you the trouble of going back and making changes from scratch. Website development and SEO are two very different skills. SEO is one of the important marketing tools that has little to do with web development. However, it goes without saying that the web developer doesn't have to take her SEO training. Perhaps that's why the web developer is confused about how to approach her SEO in the development process. It's easy. Any web developer just needs to know these 5 SEO basics to make sure they're doing it right.

11 SEO best practices for web developers

1. Site map

Improving crawlability plays an important role in search engine optimization. When search engines try to index your site, they need to be able to crawl your entire site. No matter how good everything is, it's natural for search engines to rank your site down if they're having trouble indexing your site. Added sitemap. Adding a sitemap now indexes the site properly. While doing so, make sure that all pages listed in your XML sitemap are free of 404 errors, useless redirects, and clean code.

2. Search structured data

Google's guidelines focus on retrieving structured data from websites. His SEO team here doesn't help with design thinking, but web developers are the main players in making it work and shine. Web developers know how to format pages so that they are easy to read for both users and search engines. Use search structured schema markup to get the most out of your formatting. This helps Google understand what's on each part of the page and what question each page answers, which improves your ranking. This is a great blend of content and UX.

3. Content

If he uses CMS features for website content management, make sure you have proper guidelines for your content team. Pages with a lot of SEO elements such as images, GIFs, PDFs, videos, and other media can slow page loading and lead to poor page structure. Using dynamic aspects to the site structure as described above and maintaining loading speed can ensure website stability without compromising content.

4. HTML coding standards and SEO go together

HTML-savvy SEOs understand how web documents should be structured and the consequences of poor coding practices. A key component of a website is the HTML element. It's to a website what a foundation, door, floor and roof are to a house. Search engines may not be able to crawl web pages properly if HTML elements are misused.

The official HTML spec limits the HTML elements that can be included in . Sections (locations for metadata that only browsers and bots see) and HTML element sections inside the (the document itself that is visible to the user). However, if you are a then an element in (or etc.) in a section where there should be metadata, search engines will stop rendering the web page from the normally hidden start. section. As a result, metadata is indexed as part of the content itself. This means that Google has not indexed this web page the way it should. This error can occur if the Facebook pixel code is in the wrong place in the . A section of a web page. Another example of how lack of coding skills affects her SEO is the 400 error response.
 

Some of his SEO guys think the 400 error code is a bad thing because they see the word "error" and immediately think it needs fixing. displayed as an error. However, SEOs familiar with HTML coding standards understand that a 400 error response code only means that the browser's REQUEST for the page is in error (because the page does not exist.)

5. Security

Website security has nothing to do with a single pillar of SEO, or it belongs to the list of SEO basics every web developer should know. But you should understand that it is also an important part of SEO. You need to make sure your SSL is working properly. The website does not contain any vulnerabilities that could be used for hacking, injecting viruses, or manipulating content. Also make sure that the pages your site links to are secure. An unsecured website can affect user experience and search engine permissions.

6. Mobile friendly

Smartphones are getting smarter. Search engines are constantly raising the bar on mobile SEO factors.

No one lugs around a desktop for quick searches. Most of them are done over the phone. A mobile-friendly website always ranks higher than his desktop-only website. Therefore, web developers need to ensure that their websites are compatible with different devices in order to achieve good SEO.

Google also uses mobile-first indexing. This means that the mobile version of your site will be crawled first. So if you want to be a search engine favorite, make sure your website works well on mobile.
 

7. Reading speed

What is UX? How can you forget lead speed?

Improving your load speed is one of the most useful SEO tactics this time of year. Google recommends improving the loading speed of the website, and developers have native speed rating tools available.

Search engines want to efficiently and quickly direct users to your site to answer their queries. If your page speed is slower than your competitor's site, Google may prioritize it. A slow-loading page also has a high bounce rate, and SEO doesn't help in this case. Optimizing images, compressing large files, improving server response time, and reducing page redirects can improve page load speed.

8. Response code

Server response codes are by far the most important part of developing a better UX. As a web developer, do your best to maintain a great UX by implementing appropriate response codes and making site navigation and actions easy and accessible. Make sure your page supports 200 server code, and if you don't need redirects, remove them for easier navigation.

9. Redirect

With the ever-evolving digital landscape, we are using advanced capabilities to improve and rebuild traditional domains and websites. Redirects can be an important SEO factor during the website migration and launch process to smoothly direct users to the right page. It is important to use the 301 and 302 redirect codes correctly. You can't just trust the rendered code. Use a tool to test your redirect code regardless of how many pages redirect to the same destination. Redirects are also essential when moving a website's equity to a new one, compromising authority.

10. Diagnose hidden problems

Coding-related issues are generally hidden in the HTML code. Since most websites are based on templates, each page that shares the template structure will increase the error. Learning to use HTML validators is easy, but understanding HTML is important to interpreting the results.

11. URLs

When talking about clean code and making your site crawlable, make sure your URLs are structured to match your navigation and sitemap content hierarchy. A well-structured URL is clear, contains keywords that describe the topic of the web page, does not contain special characters or spaces, and is written in lowercase.

Conclusion

Interfaces and collaboration between SEO professionals and web developers are important. SEO leverages his technical SEO best practices and other matters such as enterprise scaling of elements on the page.