If developers know the basics and include them in their builds and site maintenance, they won’t have to do any extra work later based on SEO Malaysia.
Check out the 10 SEO basics that web developers must know, as well as some focus group discussions with my teams of SEO experts and web developers.
1. Security
Search engines care about how safe a website is.
Make sure you have an SSL set up and that it works well.
This is where we start.
Beyond that, make sure the site has all the safety measures it needs to make sure it doesn’t have any holes that could be used to inject malware, change content, etc.
Any kind of hacking hurts the user experience and sends bad signals of trust to both users and search engines.
But keep site speed in mind when you use plugins, extensions, or tools to secure the site (more on that later).
2. Response Codes
Server response codes matter.
There are often different ways for a user to get a page to load, and different UX designs can lead developers to come up with creative ways to make the page work.
Regardless, make sure pages are rendering 200 server codes.
Find the source of any 3xx or 4xx codes and make sure they are up to date. Remove redirects if you don’t need them.
3. Redirects
When moving from an old site to a new one, redirects are an important part of the process of moving and launching the new site.
If you do nothing else in your launch process, you should at least use redirects.
We’re talking about making sure that all URLs from the old site have a 301 redirect to the most relevant subject page on the new site.
This could be one page from the old site to one page from the new site, or it could be many pages from the old site to one page if you are streamlining and updating the content structure.
Just like with server codes, don’t trust that a page is fine just because it is rendering.
Check that redirects are 301s by using tools.
4. Robots.txt
If a site can’t be indexed and shown in search results, SEO doesn’t matter.
Don’t think of the robots.txt file as something extra.
The default commands are sometimes too open and sometimes too closed.
Know what the robots.txt file says.
Don’t just send the file from staging to production without looking at it first.
Several sites that had great plans for moving and launching were messed up when a “disallow all” command from staging, which was meant to keep the development site from being indexed, was sent to the live site.
Also, you might want to block low-value things like tag pages, comment pages, and any other changes your CMS makes.
Most of the time, you’ll need to think about a lot of low-value junk, and if you can’t stop the pages from being made, at least stop them from being indexed.
5. Sitemaps
We can make sure that the search engines know about all of our pages by using XML sitemaps.
Don’t waste time and money on images, unimportant pages, and other things that shouldn’t be the focus of your attention and indexing.
Make sure that all XML sitemap pages return a 200 server code.
Keep them clean and free of 404s, redirects, and anything else that isn’t the destination page.
6. URLs
Good URLs are short, have words that relate to what the page is about, are all lowercase, and don’t have any characters, spaces, or underscores.
I love it when the subfolders and pages in the URL structure match the content hierarchy in the navigation and site structure.
7. Mobile Friendly
Again, keep in mind that just because something works or looks good in a browser doesn’t mean it’s good for a search engine.
It’s important for search to be mobile-friendly.
Use Google’s mobile-friendly tool to make sure it works.
Make sure it passes.
Think about the content that will be shown on the mobile version.
“Mobile first” indexing is what Google uses.
That means they are viewing the site on their phone.
If you hide or don’t render important content that you want search engines to look at in the mobile version because you want to improve the user experience, you should think twice and know that Google may not see that content.
8. Site Speed
This is number eight on the list, but after making sure your site can be indexed, it may be the most important.
Speed is important for a site.
Sites and pages that take too long to load hurt UX and conversion rates.
They also have an effect on how well SEO works.
There isn’t just one way to make a site load faster.
It really comes down to keeping your code light, using plugins and extensions wisely, making sure your hosting environment is optimized, compressing and minifying JS and CSS, and keeping image sizes in check.
Any code, files, or parts that can change the way something works or make it less stable are a risk.
Set up any content management safeguards so that a 10MB image can’t be uploaded and crash a page. Or an update to a plugin slows things down without anyone noticing.
Set a speed benchmark, keep an eye on it, and keep making it faster.
My Lead Developer likes to use web.dev or Lighthouse in the developer tools for the Google Chrome browser.
9. Heading Tags
Heading tags give search engines a great idea of what the page is about.
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.
Don’t use an H5 for the page’s main heading and an H1 for its subheadings.
There is a lot of talk about how headings help or hurt SEO performance.
In this piece, I’m 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 just one H1 on a page if you can.
Work with your SEO tools to figure out the plan for headings and content on the page as a whole.
10. Content Management & Dynamic Content
As was said above, the way a CMS works can mess up even the best development implementations.
Be smart about who you let in charge.
Understand the site’s ongoing content plan and needs so that content creators have the control they want and need but can’t mess up site speed or any of the SEO on-page elements.
Having as many dynamic features as possible, like tags, XML sitemap generation, redirects, and more, can save you time and protect your site and code to keep everything stable.
Conclusion
It’s important for SEO professionals and web developers to meet and work together.
SEO is based on best practices for technical SEO and other things, like scaling on-page items for large businesses.
Developers who know the basics of SEO can help a lot with collaboration and SEO performance.
Plus, it can make website development work go more smoothly and reduce the need for “SEO-specific” updates and changes.
Read more at The Trust Blog.
