The Ultimate Guide To Web Developer SEO Strategy

One of the most crucial factors in a website’s performance is search engine optimization, which affects how visible your website is on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and others.

The proper SEO approach can increase user visibility on your site and increase relevant traffic. If you are a web developer who produces web pages or enhances them for better performance and user experience, this post is for you. Let’s examine some advice to assist you in enhancing the SEO of the websites you create or optimize.

Should web developers know SEO?

SEO is a collection of online marketing techniques that support web development efforts and raise search engine rankings for websites. Web designers can increase their chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages when visitors type specific terms into Google or other search engines by optimizing a site’s content and metadata.

On-page SEO and off-page SEO are the two main categories of SEO.

• On-page SEO refers to optimizing a site’s content to meet the needs of search engines crawlers and users.
• Off-page SEO refers to efforts to attract Google’s attention through paid advertising campaigns or other means, like submitting content to directories. The part that you affect as a developer is the on-page SEO.

By researching best practices and producing high-quality content that organically performs highly in search results, even web developers without a solid background in digital marketing can pick up enough knowledge to provide value to projects. Why not extend your web development process in some way?

Thus, this article serves as a primer on technical SEO for developers.

How do the search engines work?

Search engines browse the web while gathering information about web pages to put in their databases. A search engine examines its database of website data when you input a search query and compares it to the information on your website. If a match is found, a list of outcomes organized by relevance is shown.

Search engines primarily consist of indexing and ranking.

• Indexing is the process of building a database of web pages containing relevant keywords and organizing them into “categories”.
• Ranking is putting those pages in order based on a set of rules so that the most relevant ones appear first.

How do you influence SEO as a web developer?

SEO heavily relies on the content, keyword selection, and backlink database—aspects that site developers typically do not handle. However, there are elements of SEO that you as a web developer should remember in order to improve the visibility of the sites you produce in search engine results.

Site structure

The structure of the website should be thought out so that users may locate the information they’re seeking for fast and effortlessly. Make sure that it just takes two to three clicks to reach the most crucial pages. By doing this, the website’s structure will be flatter and users won’t give up trying to find their way out of the maze of random subpages.

Technical analysis

When your website is complete, you will take care of this section. You’ll need one of the page analysis tools we employ, though occasionally we supplement that.

You will start receiving emails on a regular basis with suggestions for improvement after setting up an account and connecting to the website. Broken pictures, duplicate content, missing meta tags, markup mistakes, and many other types of issues are included, along with information on which subpages they occur on and how to correct them. Additionally, you may always check the issues list in the tool panel.

Furthermore, Ahrefs and Semrush provide you with a general health score so you can determine whether you are moving in the correct path. Use them, particularly when making big website updates.

Google Search Console

You can use Google Search Console as a tool to monitor the effectiveness of your website. When I refer to performance, I also mean the average position of your site in the search results, the amount of people who see it there, and how many hits it receives from the search engine result pages. You can also check to make sure that each subpage is correctly indexed. You can manually upload a sitemap, which is crucial for more complicated pages.

The Core Web Vitals report was the final topic I wanted to cover in this paragraph. What I’m trying to convey is that you can check in this part to see if your website loads properly and quickly for desktop and mobile devices, which not only improves the user experience but also affects how well the page ranks. Additionally, it’s very worth looking into because both SEO and user experience depend on site speed.

The following are the three parts of Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – shows the perceived load speed, where the page’s main body is likely to be loaded.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures unexpected shifts of elements on the page.
• First Input Delay (FID) – measures the time from the user’s first interaction with the website to the moment when the browser can process this event.

Page Speed Insights

You may use to determine how quickly your website and each of its component parts loads. Additionally, advice on how to optimize page load parameters will be provided.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a text file that contains a list of all the files, subpages, and other content that makes up the website. Additionally, it reveals details regarding the connections between the various website elements.

A sitemap gives additional information about the material, such as the publication date, alternate language versions, or video length, and instructs the search engine where to look for key sections of the website. Additionally, it alerts website visitors to updates, bugs, and overall facilitates search engine robots’ navigation of your website.

Do I have to use a sitemap?

Generally speaking, let’s say your website is user-friendly and not overly complex (meaning that all important subpages are accessible from navigation or links on the subpages – which is connected with the paragraph about the page structure).

The search engine bot should then automatically visit the majority of your website. A sitemap can be very helpful if you know a website will expand or if it is already quite large at the start, has a large archive of information, or many files like photographs and videos.

The main concept is that by making the job of the search engine bots easier, you may boost your website’s SEO more quickly than you could without one.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file is a good idea if anything should not be indexed (e.g., 404, privacy policy, cart page, logins) because it instructs search engines where they may and cannot enter.

The Google manual claims that this is not the greatest method for keeping particular subpages hidden from the Google robot; rather, it should only be used to avoid overwhelming the page with requests. Even if other websites link to the subpage you want to hide, the Google bot may still index it.

Use the noindex meta tag to ensure that the chosen subpage won’t appear in the search results.

Redirects

Establishing the proper 301 redirects should be done each time your URLs are changed. If not, search engines might erase or modify addresses from their indexes.

The search engines will eventually index the new addresses, and anyone who enters the old address will be forwarded to the new page.

What redirects to use?

You will probably use one of the following two types of redirect most often:

• use 301 redirect for pages that you permanently move to the new address,
• use 302 redirects for pages that you move to the new URL only for a while.

Meta tags

Use meta tags to provide the Google bot with more details about your page. The two most widely used tags, meta title and meta description, serve as the foundation. When viewing the search results, the user sees something similar. It is still worthwhile setting the words of your choice in your meta description, even though Google has the right to change it if it decides that other content from the subpage is more relevant.

A comprehensive list of meta tags that the Google bot can interpret is available.

Schema markup

This code aids in the content’s comprehension by the search engines. Such code can be manually added or generated by a plug-in or generator. Do you want your website to show in search results as more than simply a title and a brief description? Do you also want to increase organic traffic to it? Use schema markup to expand the SEO check list.

You can write your own schema, but if you’d prefer to use a tool, check out.

Open graph

For the purpose of accurately displaying the content of your page on social media, Open Graph is a unique type of code snippet. Even though it may not be SEO, it still influences how the website’s content appears when shared on social media. If you optimize the website, it is worthwhile to take care of this aspect as well.

Social media consumers will be able to grasp your content more quickly and easily if Open Graph is used. Facebook will also be able to recognize what you are posting more clearly and make it more visible.

Broken links

Links that connect to pages that no longer exist or have changed shouldn’t be present on your website. It will undermine your efforts to raise the site’s SEO because it is a dead end for search engine bots. Additionally, it is detrimental to UX because people will leave the nonexistent subpage.

Want to quickly see if the page contains any broken links? There is a free utility available from Ahrefs.

Internal links

Do you have any say in how internal linking is done? If so, ensure sure your pages are linked to one another. Users will be able to discover the information they are looking for, and you will make the bot’s job easier. Just keep in mind to avoid introducing extra complexity and to maintain a simple website structure.

Use specific keywords in your internal links rather than the generic “click here” because Google also takes into account the anchor text of your link.

Canonicals

Canonical links are used to prevent duplicate material. You can identify the primary version of pages with repetitive content using the rel=”canonical” tags. This means that if you have multiple subpages with the same content, you should utilize canonicals to prevent indexing issues.

Not so obvious SEO basics

You may have read about the following three points numerous times. I am aware that these are occasionally overlooked, so remember to add them to your list of things to do when optimizing your website.

How to create URLs?

When building your page, keep the URLs in mind. Not just you should be able to read them; users and bots should be the major audience. You’ll be alright if you keep them brief, include the crucial details and keywords, and make them simple to recall.

Image optimization

Every instruction for beginners in SEO will discuss it. For the record, though, make sure to utilize alt captions with keyword-rich content and compress your images so that they are lightweight but yet of great quality. If any of your images are titled like “test 2”, replace them to a name that is more evocative before publishing.

Did you remember about HTTPS?

Another foundation, although there are still websites without it, so make careful to confirm that HTTPS has been implemented on your website.

Do you need to switch to HTTPS?

Remember to set redirects from links from the old HTTP version to the new HTTPS if you already have an HTTP website and need to transition to HTTPS.

How to check if your SEO is working?

You are well aware of the considerations that should be made during web creation to improve the likelihood that a website will rank highly in search results. But how can you tell if you’re improving? Here are some tests you can use to determine if you are heading in the correct direction.

Additionally, keep in mind that not all adjustments you make right once will have an impact, so you must consider your SEO strategy over the long run.

1. Organic traffic

When it comes to evaluating the outcomes of an SEO campaign, I believe this is the most logical measurement.

Go to the Google Search Console panel and select Search results from the Performance option on the left. There, you may track the evolution of the volume of search engine views and clicks on your page.

2. Indexed pages

Keep track of how many of your URLs or pages have been indexed. If there is a sudden change, check it occasionally because that indicates a problem with the page.

Select the Pages report under the Index section in Google Search Console.
Although it’s preferable to utilize the GSC, you can instead use Google site:yoursite.com to estimate the number of indexed pages. However, isn’t that a means to gauge your rivals’ strength?

3. Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals provide you a better view of UX, particularly page loading speed, which is vital to keep under control even though Google does not currently consider it to be a significant factor in ranking pages.

To see how your website is performing, go to Google Search Console and click Core Web Vitals under the Experience area.

4. Website Health Score

This was covered in the section on technical analysis (check it to find tools that provide this measure). Without digging into more specific indicators, you can easily determine whether your SEO efforts are paying off by looking at your website’s overall score.

There are many other factors that are important to consider, but I chose these four since I understand that a web developer probably doesn’t have much time to devote to researching SEO given his other obligations. The second argument is because these chosen measurements have a strong relationship to the ideas I previously provided and don’t need more research.

Use technical search engine optimization

SEO is a broad subject that involves tasks that everyone can perform, not just SEO specialists or content marketers, as you have previously discovered. You might not need to worry about things like keyword research, link development, or content creation, but you can handle the technical components of SEO. You’re definitely aware by now that some technical SEO duties are within the realm of comfort for web developers.

You can create websites for your clients with the aid of SEO for web developers, and they will get a better end result. The knowledge you have gained can also be used to build your own website, which will be more visible online owing to the right optimization.

What if you require a web crew to support your growing website? Don’t waste time looking around; get in touch with us, and we’ll help you choose the best web development team and figure out what to do when to increase your website’s visibility in search results and attract worthwhile organic traffic.