SEO is the most important aspect for any website. In this article, I will explain the importance of SEO in website development and what SEO factors to consider when developing/designing a website.
1. FAST LOAD TIMES – The most important factor and Google recognizes it. It does not penalize websites that are slow, but rewards websites that are fast. Make sure your code is manageable and your client side renders quickly.
2. SEO Friendly Content – Keep a mix of images, text, and animations. Google loves rich content. Gone are the days when search engines preferred text. These days, Google will give you preference if your content has an embedded video. Rich content ranks faster these days.
3. SEO FRIENDLY URLS – Query parameters are good for development but bad for SEO, make sure you have the option to write a keyword rich URL as this is a ranking factor on search result pages of Google.
4. TITLE TAGS, META TAGS, META DESCRIPTION: If you can use a plugin, that’s good, but if you have custom stack development, be aware of these fields. Provide provisions on each page to put in these fields.
5. H1, h2 tags: These tags help search engines understand the subject of the underlying content. Google still uses H1 tags to determine relevance. Use these tags to define your content. Be careful, there should be only 1 h1 tag on your page.
6. XML SITEMAP – An XML sitemap should be submitted to Google webmasters account for faster indexing of your website pages. Make a provision to automatically generate or manually generate these sitemaps for quick indexing by search engine robots.
7. ROBOTS.txt – This file contains an important statement. It tells the bots about the pages you want indexed when a search engine bot comes looking. It is up to the search engines to fulfill the requests mentioned in ROBOTS.txt
8. DELETE TEXT/DUMP PAGES – Remember to delete the pages you used when creating the website. This could include images, lorem ipsum passages. Stuffing your website with dump text won’t help at all.
9. Image ALT Tags – A search engine bot cannot prepare your image, but it can only read the alt text of your image. Foresee in the code of your website to put alt tags, since it is one of the most important factors in SEO.
10. BLOG – Google loves fresh websites. New content ranks higher than outdated content. By maintaining a blog, you can not only build a community of followers, but it helps a lot in the SEO of the website. Make a provision for the blog on your website.
These are some factors involved in developing an SEO friendly website. A good website development company can really optimize code well and give you an edge over your competitors by leveraging SEO factors.