You know the difficulty…you just have to deal with those four or five tickets that mean a lot to your SEO goals this month.
But how do you get your web developers involved?
How can you help them understand the urgency of your SEO needs when they have so many other competing priorities?
Fifteen years ago, I could do about 90% of the SEO work myself for a given client.
Gone are those days. SEO now relies on content creation, user experience, code development, IT, approvals at various tiers/levels, and more.
I have written many times about how SEO cannot be done in silos And glad it’s a discipline that now focuses more on alignment in order to create a high-quality experience for website visitors.
Throughout my career, I have always needed the support of web developers.
That means going downhill at my agency, or working with a third-party developer that my client contracts or hires.
In either case, getting support and support from web development is critical for SEO.
Better is when developers understand Search Engine Optimization Principles.
If developers understand the basics and incorporate it into their builds and site maintenance, it will be more efficient and avoid any rework later on.
Check out 10 SEO Basics Every Web Developer Must Know, plus some focus groups with my team of SEO experts and developers.
1. Safety
Website security is important to search engines.
Make sure you have SSL and there are no errors.
This is the starting point.
In addition to this, there are necessary safeguards to ensure that the website has no vulnerabilities that allow injection, manipulation of content, etc.
Hacking at any level can damage the user experience and the trust signals of users and search engines.
However, please note website speed (more on that) when you use any plugin, extension or tool to secure your website.
2. Response code
The server response code is important.
There are usually ways to make the page present to the user and a unique UX design that will lead to some creative development.
In any case, make sure the page renders 200 server codes.
Get and update any 3xx or 4xx code. Remove the redirect if you don’t need it.
3. Redirect
Speaking of redirects, they are Site Migration and Launch Process From old site to new site.
If you don’t do anything else during startup, at least implement a redirect.
We’re talking about making sure all URLs in the old site have 301 redirects to the most relevant topic pages on the new site.
If you’re simplifying and updating your content structure, this could be 1:1 old site versus new site pages or many-to-one.
Just like the server code above, don’t trust the page is rendering and assume it’s fine.
Use a tool to verify that the redirect is a 301.
4. Robot.txt
SEO is meaningless if a website cannot be indexed and shown in search results.
Don’t let the robots.txt file be an afterthought.
Sometimes the default command is too open, and in other cases, too restrictive.
Learn what’s in robots.txt.
Don’t blindly push staging files to production without checking.
Some sites with heavy migration and launch plans are blocked by disabling all staging commands (to prevent the development site from being indexed), which is pushed to the live site.
Also, consider blocking low-value items like tabs, comment pages, and any other variations your CMS creates
You usually have a lot of low-value junk to think about, if you can’t prevent pages from being generated, at least prevent them from being indexed.
5. Sitemap
XML sitemaps are our opportunity to make sure search engines understand all of our pages.
Don’t waste resources and opportunities with images, irrelevant pages, and things that shouldn’t be prioritized and indexed.
Make sure that all pages listed in the XML sitemap render 200 server code.
keep them clean and free 404s, Redirects, and anything that isn’t the target page.
6. URL
Good URLs are concise, contain words related to the topic of the page, lowercase, and have no characters, spaces, or underscores.
i like to watch one URL structure of subfolders and pages that match the content hierarchy in the navigation and site structure.
Downgrade three?
Then “example.com/level-1/level-2/topical-page”.
7. Mobile friendly
Again, keep in mind that just because something works or looks good in a browser doesn’t mean it’s ideal for search engines.
Mobile friendliness is important to search.
Verify it with Google’s mobile-friendly tool.
Make sure it passes.
Beyond that, think about what’s rendered in the mobile version.
Google uses a “mobile-first” index.
This means they are viewing the mobile version of the site.
If you hide or don’t present important content that you want search engines to take into account for user experience in the mobile version, think twice and know that what Google sees may be lost.
8. Site Speed
This is number eight on the list, but probably the most important after making sure your site can be indexed.
Website speed is important.
Slow page loads and websites hurt user experience and conversions.
They can also have an impact on SEO performance.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing website speed.
It really boils down to keeping your code lightweight, using plugins or extensions wisely, having an optimized hosting environment, compressing and minifying JS and CSS, and controlling image size.
Any code, files and aspects that may cause performance changes or instability is a risk.
Build in any safeguards for content management controls, so you can’t upload 10MB images and take up pages. Or the plugin update can’t detect how it’s slowing things down.
Continuously baseline, monitor and improve site speed.
My lead developer’s favorite tool is web development or lighthouse in Google Chrome dev tools.
9. Title Tag
Title tags are important context clues for search engines.
Remember, they are for content, not CSS shortcuts.
Yes, tie your CSS to them, but put them in order of importance.
Instead of making the first largest page title an H5, make the subtitle on the page an H1.
There are a lot of comments about the impact of titles (or not) on SEO performance.
I’m not going there in this article.
as literal as possible in the hierarchy, how they are used.
Use them instead of other CSS whenever possible.
Only have one H1 on a page if you can.
Use your SEO resources to understand the overall plan for title and page content.
10. Content Management and Dynamic Content
As mentioned above, CMS features can break the best development implementation.
Be smart about the control you give.
Understand the site’s ongoing content plans and needs so that content creators have the control they want and need, but without compromising site speed or any SEO page elements.
Having as many dynamic aspects as possible like markup, XML sitemap generation, redirects, etc. saves you time and protects your site and code to keep everything stable.
in conclusion
Intersection and collaboration between SEO professionals and web developers is very important.
SEO relies on technical SEO and other best practices, such as enterprise scaling of page items.
Developers who understand the basics of SEO can go a long way toward successful collaboration and SEO performance.
Additionally, it increases the efficiency of website development efforts and reduces rework or “SEO-specific” updates and requests.
More resources:
Featured image: baranq/Shutterstock
