Things Developer Should Know About SEO

Understanding some SEO basics will go a long way to helping you code pages that will perform well when Google crawls them.

If you are a developer then keep the following SEO guidelines in mind as you’re working on your website.

1. Write a good, user friendly URL

Bad example : http://halla.in/contest.php?contest_id=MTgx

Good Example : https://www.twenty20.com/challenges/underwater

Don’t use Underscore (_) in URLs to separate words instead you can use hyphen(-).

2. Watch your Meta Tags:

In some cases, coding errors can confuse search engines when they try to read the page, which is bad in every way possible. Search engines can’t rank what they can’t even understand.

Developers also need to be aware of the importance of meta tags.

Developers don’t usually create the content of the meta tags, but they still need to understand how they work.

The most important meta tags are the title and description tags. Whenever a user conducts a search, the content from these two tags is the first thing that users see in the search results.

As a developer, one way you can hurt your page rankings is by accidentally creating duplicate meta tags. Search engines generally frown on duplicate content, so avoid this.

3. Fast – site speed

Google has stated the page load speed matters in their algorithm, so make sure you have tuned your site and are obeying best practices to make things speedy. Always try to Minify CSS & JS.

4. Create a good 404 Page.

5. Proper Image file name & <alt> tag

Try to add proper name to images which you are using in website. Don’t just add random name like Homepage1.jpg, homepage2.jpg, etc. it’s really a bad habit. Just observe image once and give a proper filename.

You must add an alt attribute to every <img> tag used into your webpage.
An image with an alternate text specified is inserted using the following HTML line:
<img src=”image.png” alt=”text_to_describe_your_image”>

Remember that the point of alt text is to provide the same functional information that a visual user would see. Search engines, users who disabled images in their browsers and other agents who are unable to see the images on your webpage can read the alt attributes assigned to the image since they cannot view it.

6. Avoid inline CSS style

It is a good practice to move all the inline CSS rules into an external file in order to make your
page “lighter” in weight and decrease the code to text ratio. Check the HTML code of your page and identify all style attributes for each style attribute found you must properly move all declarations in the external CSS file and remove the style attribute.

7. Use HTML Compression/Gzip

Compress your pages using gzip compression on your code. This helps ensure a
faster loading web page and improved user experience.

8. Reduce HTTP requests

You can reduce http requests through various methods such as using text instead of images, using css sprites, using data URIs instead of images, or combining several external files together into one.

9. Never use Flash and iframe.

10. Use Canonicalisation :

For eg., http://example.com and http://www.example.com/ should resolve to the same URL. Fix your URL and redirect other URL to your fixed one. Client want example.com as a main URL, If user type www.bookmywash.co then it should redirect to bookmywash.co .

In order to fix this you must consider using a 301 re-write rule in your .htaccess file so that
both addresses (http://example.com and http://www.example.com) resolve to the same URL.

11. IP CANONICALIZATION

Website’s IP should redirect to Website’s domain name.