Tuesday 23 February 2016

SEO Best Practices for Web Developers

 SEO best practices have always been an essential component of successful Web Development. There is no doubt that developmental practices are impacted considerably by these practices. However, it is all for the benefit of the web page as successful SEO translates to better business. Let us take a look at some of the SEO best practices that need to be adopted by Web Developers.

 Clean Code:

Clean up your codes. Make them lighter and more organized. Take care to define semantics properly, eliminate redundant elements and conform to W3C standards. Search Engines prefer clean and lean codes in comparison to heavier ones. Also, you could use CSS to help you with the clean up process. The shorthand properties of CSS are extremely effective in delivering shorter lines of code.

Apply Header tags:

Include vital keywords within the header tags to attract search engines more easily. Moreover, ensure that all important keywords are in text format and not as images. Search engines are unable to index images which lead to a negative impact on the page ranking.

Create Leaner Pages:

It would be immensely beneficial to your page ranking if you are able to maintain a leaner page. Clean up your scripts and get rid of redundant lines of code. Reduce the number of images and also optimize image sizes as much as possible.

 Add Descriptive Text in Links:

Search Engines while accessing links need to understand what that page is about. Therefore, it is advisable that you use text links as much as possible. However, in the scenario that you do need to use images, ensure that you use a descriptive ALT text to help search engines in gauging the purpose of the page.

Avoid DHTML menus:

Web crawlers are unable to view Javascript DHTML menus. It is therefore likely that if you have designed DHTML menus they will be skipped by these search engines like Google, which depend on web crawlers for building their repository. It is therefore a good idea if you include an HTML based navigation for best results.

Use CSS to position keywords:

CSS can be used to implement absolute positioning of keywords. They could be used to push text layers to the top of the source code so that search engines are able to notice them at the initial phase of their indexing. In plain HTML pages, however, the content containing relevant keywords are pushed to the bottom of the code and prevent search engines from detecting it quickly.

Avoid hidden or invisible text:

Webmasters have often indulged in using hidden or invisible text to attract viewer traffic. However, termed as Black Hat SEO practices these are considered to be ill-directed efforts in drawing viewer attention. Moreover, search engines who trace these hidden keywords would also be penalizing these sites for following these deceptive practices. Moreover, also known as keyword spamming, these are extremely annoying to users who reach the site only to find that they are hardly relevant to their search criteria.

Adopt Permanent Site Redirect Structure:

It is always a better practice to implement the 301 site redirects that are permanent in comparison to the 302 temporary redirects. This ensures that search engines are able to index your content in the appropriate fashion.

No comments:

Post a Comment