SEO is the most important aspect for any website. In this article I will elaborate on the importance of SEO in website development and what SEO factors to consider while developing / designing a website.
1. FAST LOADING TIMES – The most important factor and Google recognizes it. It does not penalizes websites that are slow, but it rewards websites that are fast. Make sure your code is manageable and your client side is rendered fast.
2. SEO Friendly Content – Keep a mixture of images, text and animations. Google loves rich content. Gone are the days, when search engines preferred text. These days, Google will giveyou preference if your content has a video embedded in it. 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 of writing a keyword rich URL for that is a ranking factor in Google search result pages.
4. TITLE TAGS, META TAGS, META DESCRIPTION – If you can use a plugin that’s good, but if you have a custom stack development, be aware of these field. Provide provisions on every page to put in these fields.
5. H1, h2 tags – These tags help search engines understand the topic of the underlying content. Google still uses H1 tags to determine relevance. Use these tags to defined your content. Be careful there should be only 1 h1 tag on your page.
6. SITEMAP XML – an XML sitemap is to be submitted to Google webmasters account for faster indexing of your website pages. Make a provision to auto generate or manually generate these sitemaps for fasting indexing by search engine bots.
7. ROBOTS.txt – This file contains an important declaration. It tells the bots about pages that you want indexed when a search engine bot comes looking. It is upto search engines to honor requests mentioned in ROBOTS.txt
8. REMOVE DUMP TEXT / PAGES – Do remember to delete pages, that you used while making the website. This might include images, lorem ipsum passages. Stuffing your website with dump text is not going to help at all.
9. Image ALT Tags – A search engine bot cannot ready your image, but it can only read the alt text of your image. Make provision in your website code to put alt – tags for it is one of the most important factors in SEO.
10. BLOG – Google loves a website that is fresh. Fresh content is ranked higher than stale ones. By maintaining a blog, not only you can build a community of followers, but it helps a lot in website SEO. Make a provision for blog on your website.
These are some factors involved in developing a SEO friendly website. A good website development company can really optimize the code well and give you an edge over your competitors by leveraging SEO factors.
