10 Must-know SEO Basics For Web Developers

You need the knowledge of SEO for web developers if you want to rank your website on Google and other search engines. Websites don't just rank on their own. A lot of work goes into play to get a website ranked on Google and other search engines. There are constant innovations in website design and search engine optimization every day. However, while the industry is constantly improving and evolving, some things remain the same. Now, these are the SEO checklist for web developers who want to be successful in this industry.

SEO Tips For Web Developers

Here are the ten must-know SEO basics for web developers:

1. Ensure The Security Of Your Users
You want to ensure your customers are safe when your customers visit your website. That means keeping them safe from malware that can damage their devices or steal sensitive information like bank account numbers and personal information. Get an SSL certificate as a first step. This ensures that any information sent between the user and your website is encrypted. This will make it hard for hackers to read.

2. Secure Your Content Management System
Of course, building a website is not something you do once, and then you're done. You need to keep adding new content to your website to rank well. Make sure only trusted web developers with enough experience can access the site fully. Content creators and writers should also have access to upload content, but they should not be allowed to edit your website’s code.  
 

3. Use The Right Heading Tags
You might think that heading tags are very dull and boring, but they are important when it comes to establishing a hierarchy on your website. Adequate use of heading tags is an essential SEO method for developers. You need to put the most important information in H1 and the rest of the information in H2, H3, H4, etc. It is like the difference between a big, bright neon sign and a sign made with a marker on a piece of paper. You need headlines that get people's attention right away.
 

4. Site Speed
No one likes a website that takes too long to load. As a web developer, you must ensure your users don't have to wait too long because even one second can make or break your website! Not only does slow site speed annoy your visitors, but it also annoys Google's bots. Google won't properly index your page if it takes too long to load. Google is a busy bee, and they don't have time to wait for you!
 

Only put important things on your website and get rid of things like heavy images or JavaScript that slow down the speed at which the page loads. Moreover, a good SEO method for developers is to use a web host that loads webpages quickly.
 

5. Mobile-friendliness
More than half of all organic searches done today are done on phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. So, you must also make your site work well for them. If you don't, you will greatly hurt the user experience and rank much lower in Google's search results. Use this Google's handy tool to see how mobile-friendly your site is.
 

6. Optimize Your URLs
URL optimization is an important SEO checklist for web developers. They are what people type into their browsers to get to your site. So, you should make sure it is short, easy to remember, relevant, and (as much as possible) free of annoying characters like underscores and spaces. You should also ensure that all possible hypothetical situations have been considered. For example, if your URL is easy to misspell, you should ensure the misspelled version also leads to your site. If you don't do this, people may unintentionally leave your site. 
 

7. Use Sitemaps
Sitemaps, as their name suggests, give search engines a map of your website so they can easily index and crawl them. Here, you can give important information about the site, such as the most recent changes or language versions, and highlight the most important parts of your website. After all, you wouldn't want pretty pictures to overshadow important written content, would you?

8. Optimize Your Robots.txt
Robots.txt is an important file on every website. As a web developer, it is a file you must put on the website you’re building if you want search engines to find and crawl through the website. If you don't have one or if it is not optimized properly, you can forget about getting high rankings in search results or even showing up there.
 

9. Use Appropriate Redirects
As a web developer who pays close attention to SEO, redirects are important for getting people to the page you want them to be. Not only do you need redirects for server codes 4XX and 5XX, but you also need them if you switched from HTTPS to HTTP or are moving to a new website. It is the same as moving to a new place – you need to leave a forwarding address so that your mails get sent to your new address even after you have moved.
 

10. Response Codes
Have you ever visited a website and seen "404: Not Found" or "500: Internal Server Error" when you clicked on it? Avoid all these on your website as much as possible. You want to give your readers a good impression, which you can not do if your website does not work.

Response codes come in five forms: 1XX, 2XX, 3XX, 4XX, and 5XX. You should avoid the last two at all costs because if a reader clicks on either of them, they will never get to your page. To fix response codes 4XX and 5XX, you can either delete the page or send people to a website or webpage that works.

The first two codes, especially 2XX, are the good guys. If you have these response codes, your website’s visitors shouldn’t have problem navigating through your site.

Conclusion
SEO experts and web designers must determine what needs to come first before anything else. Once you know these ten SEO tips for web developers, then you can build a well-optimized website. If you own a business but don't know much about SEO and web design, you can leave everything to the experts. Visit our website today to hire a professional freelance web developer or UI/UX designer.