What are the Essential SEO Tips that Every Web Developer Should Follow?

Most developers often overlook the search engine optimization part of web development that affects the ranking of the site. If you want your site to be ranked high on Google, there are certain SEO techniques that you should follow.

Here are 10 must-follow SEO techniques for making the site search engine friendly and thus increasing the page rank.

1. Semantic and Valid MarkupNever compromise on the above mentioned factor. It is important that you write meaningful and semantic markup so that it becomes easier for search engine crawlers to extract and classify the relevancy of the page. You can do this by two things:

   By using proper listings and headings.
   By validating the markup .

   There has always been a hot discussion about using <h1> tag for the title/logo of the page, but what is important is that the information on the page should be presented hierarchically by using all the six heading tags.

2. Optimization of Title and Meta TagsIt was a few years ago that developers used to pay special emphasis on Meta tags. But search engines no longer rely on them so you have to shift your focus on the meta tag description as this is the very first thing that will be displayed on the result page below the title.

   The title tag is important for a search engine and it should be different for every page. Make sure the tag is relevant and describes the content of the page. Don’t make it too long.

   There are many useful plugins for managing the title tags and Meta tags for WordPress blog users. All in One SEO pack is one of them.

3. Using alt and Title AttributesA title attribute not only makes the site more accessible but also tells the topic of the site you are linking to, to the search engine. Therefore, you should avoid experimenting things like:

   To see all of our handcrafted clothes, <a href=”#”>Click here</a>

   Instead of this, use should use:

   <a href=”#” title=”See all of our handcrafted clothes”>View all of our handcrafted clothes</a>

   Although, the alt attribute is mainly the same but when it comes to images, the attribute is a way of describing the image to the search engine.

4. Google Webmasters ToolsGoogle will do a lot of work for you if you will add the Google Webmasters Tools, which is linked with your Gmail/Google account to your site. By this, you will get to know how the crawlers index the site and thus, you will be able to figure out the problems with the site. Apart from this, you will see the internal and external links pointing to your website as well as the search queries dropping most of the web traffic to the site.

   This will help you in deciding upon the domain name for the site with or without www so that the page rank doesn’t get divided.

5. Keeping HTML SimpleYou should build the site by only using the markup that is necessary. Try to make the layout as simple as possible by avoiding tables, as all this will help search engines to index the site easily.
6. Avoiding FramesIt is true that frames increase the site loading time and the search engines will find it difficult to crawl the site.

   Try to use noframes content and give a descriptive title with each frame.

7. Use Flash CarefullySearch engines are no more restrained from indexing flash content, but they are still no so good at it. Keep flash to minimum and avoid it for text. You should not use flash for creating menus. The alternative for this is making the same effects by using CSS and JavaScript while keeping the html structure clean.

   Limit the use of flash to embed videos/sound and animation.

8. Breadcrumb NavigationIf you are looking for a secondary navigation aid, use breadcrumb. With this, users will find it easier to move around the site. But you should ensure that the text on the breadcrumb links must describe the accurate content of the related page.
9. Site Map
   
   Apart from creating a sitemap.xml, you should also have a detailed html sitemap page that will pass on the link to every page of the site. The search engines as well as users will easily find content through the site map and don’t forget that lesser clicks to get a page means a better site.
10. Avoid Content DuplicationDuplicate content is always dangerous for search engine rankings. Supposedly, you have a WordPress blog, you will probably have archive pages and a category on the sidebar. All these pages will be a collection of your previous posts, so they can be identical also. For example, if there is a just a post in the category or on a given day, the content on the category/ archive page will be same as the post is.

    This and other content duplication related problem could be solved by using noindex. Follow robots Meta tag by using 301 redirect or a robots.txt file.