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SEO-Friendly Website Development Tips in 2019

There is a very close relationship between SEO and Website development. Building an SEO-friendly site requires careful planning and a structured approach to representing your business and the services you provide. For many businesses, this can be complicated — it’s not always easy to document exactly what you do. You will only achieve a good position in search engines if you have adopted a series of good SEO practices in the development tasks.

SEO Web Development is a way of developing websites to make them search engine friendly. Creating a website SEO friendly means the search engines can able to crawl each individual page on the website efficiently. SEO and Web design function together. Majority of the web designers are choosing to incorporate SEO while designing websites.

Image source – wdipl.com

What is Web Development?

Web development is the work involved in developing a web site for the internet but nowadays this definition is completely changed. Now the Web development and seo is the work involved in developing a web site for users and search engines like google, bing, duck duck go etc. Web development mainly ranges from developing a simple single static page of plain web text to complex web-based internet applications, social network services and electronic businesses.

What is SEO?

SEO the term stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is nothing but getting free traffic from the organic search results on search engines like google, bing, yahoo, etc.

What is SEO Web Development?

When we developing a website we need to take care of basic facts about SEO. SEO is not only the task which is done after the website has been live. There are many things we need to optimize at the time of web development. The main point of creating a website is that users will be able to see the information you are providing on it for business.

image source – kvrwebtech.com

SEO-friendly website design (building) guideline Tips in 2019

Create a keyword/topic map. (Keyword Mapping)

image source – Semrush

Keyword mapping is the process of locating or mapping keywords to individual specific pages on a website based on keyword research.

Remember That Keyword Research (and Mapping) procedure Doesn’t Stop

Once your keyword mapping is complete, then start to create pages and optimization process and then set a calendar reminder to do this process all over again.

SEO-friendly domain name.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that having keywords in your domain helps. It just looks daft. It can help a little for local businesses but ensure you are mapping to the real world. Be sensible.

Use Branding in Your Domain Name

Avoid Hyphens and numbers in Your Domain Name.

SEO-friendly web host.

A slow site makes for unhappy users. Your hosting should follow common-sense rules. Be situated where your audience is situated. Be fast. Be platform-specific, if necessary.

If you really wish to protect server errors and page timeouts – and stop users bounce rate then you should opt for a solid web host plan.

Choosing CMS that works well for SEO.

The CMS which is stands for the content management system, you choose for your business can greatly influence how successful you are. We would suggest WordPress as its a great option but there are many more are in the market.

Give high priority to choose the CMS than the one your selected web company prefers to work with.

A good CMS is easy to use. You should be able to design your site the way you want it but it’s better to do a fast-track web-design course. Learning Catalyst is providing a fast track course for it with minimal price.

The Best CMS for SEO

WordPress.Joomla.
Drupal
PrestaShop.
Magento.
Blogger.
MODx.
Concrete5.

Choose SEO-friendly website theme

The theme you choose for your WordPress site or any other platform can significantly affect your SEO outcomes, so it’s better to choose one that is ready for SEO.

SEO for web designing consists of many points like:-

1. How design will affect the popularity of any website.

2. Why and how color combinations must be used for displaying a perfect view for the website.

3. making the websites more lively.

Build pages within a logical information architecture.

IA stands for Information architecture is like a blueprint. Its nothing but the visual representation of the product’s infrastructure, features, and hierarchy. The level of detail is up to the designer, so IA may also include navigation, application functions and behaviors, content, and flows. There is no set limit to the size or shape of IA; nevertheless, it should encompass the generalized structure of the product so anyone (theoretically) should be able to read it and understand how the product works.

SEO in website structure :

image source – blog.markgrowth.com

We need to find the best structure for the website so that every essential part of the website cant remain unseen.

The better and simpler your site structure, the better your chance of higher ranking in the search engines.

A good site structure means the best user experience.

Google always give high weightage to a good site structure to show site with sitelinks.

A good website structure means better crawling rate from any other search engine.

Make your site structure hierarchy logical. Always try to balance the number of subcategories within each category.

Website Menu Navigation

image source – deviantart.com

At the heart of every well-verse designed website is a website navigation menu. It’s nothing but the online compass & index which guides the user around a website helping them discover what they’re looking for. The visual structure and labels of your navigation can have a huge impact on results.

Navigation affects conversions: how easy the site is to use, what percentage of visitors convert into leads and customers

Here is a checklist for SEO-friendly website navigation best practices.

1. Be descriptive

2. Avoid format-based navigation

3. Avoid dropdown menus

4. Limit the number of menu items – mostly six to seven

5. The order of your website navigation is mainly important

Include optimized user experience (UX) components.

Usability a term refers to the access by user and use of a product or website in a simpler way with a higher rate.

It should be an easier experience for the user to become familiar with and competent in using the user interface (UI) on the first contact with the website.

It should be easy for users to achieve any objective or goals through using the website.

It should be easy in such way that user can able to recall the user interface and how to use it on subsequent visits.

Check out technical series of practical SEO friendly web development tips to coordinate SEO and web development,

Site Speed / Download Speed

image source – sitechecker.pro

Site speed is also one of the important Google’s ranking factors. Naturally the faster the site the higher potential score you will get for this one part of their algorithm. According to Moz’s breakdown of website speed and ranking the main factor is the time it takes for the first byte of information to come across the pipes.

It is the most important factor in the Google ranking. The faster you download your page, the better results you have in your algorithm.

Redirects

Nobody likes dead links, this can easily happen when something major about the structure of your site changes (domain name, internal structure).

A redirect is a definite way or solution to send both users and search engines to a different URL or location from the one they previously requested. The two most commonly used redirects are redirect 301 and redirect 302.

A 301 redirect means that the page has permanently moved to a new path i.e new URL. A 302 redirect means that the URL is temporally moved.

Status Codes

Status Codes are the codes returned from your server after a request has been made, as a developer you need to make sure you are returning the correct code at any given moment.

HTTP status codes play an important role for website business or owners

Here is the list of HTTP Status codes.

Status code 200 – OK: – Normal Live Page

Status code 301 – Moved Permanently – Page moved to a different page

Status code 302 – Moved Temporarily – temporarily shifted to another page

Status code 403 – Forbidden:

Status code 404 – Not Found: Page not found on the website

Status code 500 – Internal Server Error:

Status code 503 – Service Unavailable:

Optimize the site for crawlability and indexation by search engines.

Your well-planned content needs to be crawled and indexed by search engines to drive organic traffic.

how search engines crawl your website.

Search engines “crawl” your websites, going from one page to another page very quickly just like hyperactive speed-readers. They simply make copies of your pages which get stored i.e. index – its nothing but the Giant book of the web.

Crawlability refers to how effectively Google, Yahoo and Bing spiders can crawl or browse your website for indexing. Poor crawlability means slow indexation time and which will affect as loss in rankings.

So how to boost crawlability of your website?

SEO Tips to boost crawlability of your site

Build backlinks to internal pages

Internally link related content

Execute content pruning

Do not use AJAX and flash menus

Create an HTML sitemap

Boost page speed

Take care of robots.txt

Avoid all HTTP Status codes errors like 404 error pages and internal server errors

Optimize your pages to load quickly.

There are some excellent ways to do this.

Combine CSS, JS scripts and HTML files together.

Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.

Reduce the elements quantity on every web page.

Install a caching plugin.

Reduce redirects, which create additional HTTP requests to your server and increase more time to load the page.

Crawlable Link Structures

image source – Moz

A structure that lets search engine spiders browse the pathways of a website—in order to find all of the pages on a website. Try running your site through Link Explorer to get a peek into what your site’s link structure looks like.

Internal and external linking works well, but always make sure that linking pages are suitable and related pages to your main issue. Websites that have “buried” pages will often find themselves very low on the overall page rank, in addition to the orphan pages themselves being completely snubbed.

Last but not least, familiarize yourself with the Robot.txt file, which is an HTML file that essentially orders crawlers what to do. Remember to check your robot.txt file to make sure that all of your pages are up to date, and still searchable by crawlers.

Efficiently designed crawlable link structures will determine whether your site is search friendly or out in the middle of nowhere!

Google can follow links only if they are an <a> tag with an href attribute. Links that use other complex formats won’t be followed by Google’s crawlers. Google cannot follow <a> links without an href tag or other tags that perform as links because of script events. Here are examples of links that Google can and can’t follow:

Create and submit a sitemap for search engines.

image source – everyinteraction.com

What is an XML sitemap? In simple terms, it’s a list of a website’s URLs. That’s why it’s called a sitemap. It maps out how the website is structured and what the website pages include.

A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the pages and its URLs and the data under each section. However, Google’s XML format was designed for the search engines to find the data faster and more efficiently.

Google recommends the following sitemaps.org protocol, which states that there are 3 acceptable types of sitemaps.

XML Sitemaps (Sitemap.xml)

RSS (2.0, Atom 0.3 or 1.0 feed)

Text File (sitemap.txt)

5 Types of Content for Sitemaps

1. Web Page URLs

2. Videos

3. Images

4. Mobile-Friendly Web Pages

5. News Web Page URLs

Optimize your robots directives.

The robots.txt file stands for the robots exclusion protocol or standard. It’s a text file that tells search engine like Google to which pages on your site to crawl. In simpler words, the robots.txt file is the file which tells the google what pages you don’t want to them index and not to index.

How you optimize robots.txt is all dependent on the content you have on your site.

One of the best and useful uses of the robots.txt file is to maximize search engines’ crawl budgets by telling them to not crawl the parts which are not displayed for the users.

Here is the example

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Search engines often and regularly check a website’s robots.txt file to see if there are any instructions are set for crawling the website. We call these instructions ‘directives’.

Now check out some important SEO On Page factors

image source – ssvtechnologies.in/

Meta Tags

Title tags and meta descriptions are bits of HTML code in the header of a web page. These tags help search engines to understand the content on a page.

Meta Title

A title tag is one of the prime ranking factor. It’s an HTML element which indicates as the title of an individual web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline text for a given query result,

Google typically displays the first 55–60 characters of a meta title tag.

But be cautious, never ever use the keyword-stuffed title

Meta Description

The meta description is a tag in HTML which gives a summary of a page’s content. It’s a snippet of up to about 155 to 275 characters. Now this is not the ranking factor but it can impact page CTR i.e. Click through Rate.

URL Structure

Url writing and structure – Url is an important part of the webpage and properly structuring of the website inside page URL is also important. URL also helps to recognize the webpage.

Create a URL structure in such way that follows your navigation hierarchy.

Hx Tags

Use of Heading tags at the time of web development can reduce the time of rework on web optimization. The header tag is generally title of a post. Its a <h1> tag in HTML.

Image optimization – As per SEO point of view your website pages should be download quickly. So we need to take care of the images which we are using on our website. They should not be heavy in size. Images names and alt tags. When we developing the website we can put a proper related name of images with proper alt tags so at the time of development our images automatically optimized and we do not need to do work in images after the website has been made.

Alt Tags

Alt text is nothing but the alternative text for the image file. Alt tags are generally used within an HTML code to give extra information about the image. Its also known as “alt attributes.

Internal links – Use internal links with keyword research in mind.

Interlinking with a proper anchor tag. We can link our internal pages with proper anchor tag so that users can easily browse the related pages and on another side interlinking with proper anchor tag will help in SEO ranking.

Use of social media buttons

It will help in boosting and socializing your website and his content.

Social Media Share Buttons are really important — Even if you Don’t Do Social Media!

Conclusion

SEO helps the website to drive the traffic towards a website in a natural way and that is why when a web developer is optimizing his/her website they always been alert for search engine updates and doing the optimization process and that is what SEO is in web development. Just as SEO does not have a great artistic base to web development, we can understand that designers, programmers and layout designers do not have a great SEO base to think about web positioning, but in the end a successful project usually has a good positioning that gives it a relevant traffic, and this should be considered from the beginning of the project, since there are guidelines that can be followed in all phases of development and for the same time we can give birth to a more Google friendly website. Hope this helped you with your doubts.

May 23, 2019/0 Comments/by Learning Catalyst