The web development team is crucial to your success if you are in charge of technical SEO but not running the website. However, developers and SEOs do not always agree on growth and marketing. How can you help them understand how vital your SEO needs are when they already have so many other things to do?
When I started doing SEO work about 15 years ago, I could do about 90% of it myself.
Regarding SEO, Denver web developers play a vital role. They are in a unique position to affect both the technical side of optimization and the on-page SEO because they are working with the codebase. Let us look at where and how web developers can fit into the ecosystem of SEO.
What is SEO technical?
Technical SEO is about making a website’s technical parts better so that its pages rank higher in search engines. The main features of technical optimization are creating a website faster, easier for search engines to crawl, and more accessible for people to understand. Technical SEO is a part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving aspects of your website to get higher orders. It is the negative of off-page SEO, which is about getting a website noticed through other channels.
Here are the following web developers need to know about technical SEO:
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Clean up your code:
Denver Web Design company can do many complicated things, but it’s usually best to keep things simple. Convenience is almost always the most important thing to consumers. We want quick access to information, and everything that gets in the way hurts the user experience. More roadblocks for site visitors can come from code that is harder to understand.
Denver web developers’ first SEO step is ensuring that your code is clean. When people land on a website, they quickly decide if it’s worth their time to look around.
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Choice of technology is essential:
Technical SEOs should know about how websites are put together. Somebody from the SEO team should be capable of joining discussions about servers, CDNs, the choice of a CMS, and JavaScript frameworks.
Google used to crawl with Chromium M41 until the last few months. That means that features that all standard browsers have supported for years could break the page for Google even though that fix shows that assumptions about web technology support can sometimes backfire in a big way.
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Add a Sitemap:
Search engines are brilliant but do not see a website as people do. They need you to show them how pages connect; your sitemap is one way to do this. Bots follow every connection on your site to find where it goes when indexing it. Adding a sitemap is one way you can help with this.
If you have good internal links, Google and the other search engines should be able to crawl your whole site. But significant areas can be hard to navigate, so a sitemap makes things easier for search engines and ensures that they will index your site correctly.
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Robots.txt: How to get into a site:
A Robots.txt file is an easy plain text file that has rules. The goal of this file is to tell search engine crawlers and bots which URLs on this site they can access. The crawl instructions say to the user agent to “disallow” or “allow” specific actions (crawlers)
For instance:
This instruction tells the msnbot not to crawl any of the website’s URLs:
User-agent: msnbot
Don’t let: /
This guide from Google is a great place to look for different types of Robots.txt instructions.
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There are not (many) broken links:
We have talked about how annoying slow websites are. Visitors might find a page that doesn’t exist even more annoying than one that loads slowly. If a link on your site leads to a page that does not exist, people will see a “404” page. Your carefully planned user experience is gone!
Also, search engines don’t like it when they find these error pages. And because they follow every link they see, even if it’s hidden, they find even more dead links than visitors.
Most sites have at least a few broken links, which is sad because a website constantly changes as people add and remove things. Some tools can help you find dead links on your site, which is good news.
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Check that your site is mobile-friendly:
A “responsive” website automatically changes to make it easy to navigate and read on any device. Google makes it clear that having a site that is easy to use on mobile devices is a significant ranking signal for its algorithms. And with Google’s new “mobile first” way of indexing content, it’s more important than ever to have a responsive website. So, it makes sense to ensure your website is fully responsive and can view in the best way possible on a phone, tablet, or computer.
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Heading Tags:
Heading tags give search engines a great idea of the page.
Remember that they are for content, not shortcuts for CSS.
Yes, make them part of your CSS, but keep them in order of how important they are. Please do not use an H5 for the page’s main heading and an H1 for its subheadings.
There is plenty of discussion about how headings help or hurt SEO performance.
In this piece, I am not going there.
Just use the hierarchy and how it works as literally as you can. Use them instead of other CSS when you can. Have merely one H1 on a page if you can. Work with your SEO tools to determine the page’s headings and content plan.
Conclusion:
Most site owners want more traffic from search engines, so developer SEO is essential. Denver web developers help SEO by making websites accessible for people to use, but it pays to understand SEO itself. Knowing the basics could help you make better decisions and give your clients better service. SEO does not have to be hard for developers, but it can make a huge difference in how well a website does.