The Significance of SEO in Web Development

Do you have a website and you can not increase the organic visits to your website? Do you want to create a new website and want to position it well in the search engines? Then learn how to ensure your web development project is built to SEO best practices.

There are many great developers who spend hours and hours to create great web pages without knowing how it will impact your website SEO abilities.

The main objective of SEO is to appear in the top positions on Google and other search engines. SEO has evolved over the past few years to reach what it is today. Previously, Google rewarded only the links, without giving priority to the quality content. That’s why, now for Google, content is king. When we talk about SEO, we must also know all the different practices: White Hat SEO (follow the rules of Google, thinking about the user) and Black Hat SEO (techniques punishable by Google).

Many developers think that SEO is something very simple and that putting titles, keywords and urls in a specific way is enough. In this article we want to show you how SEO is much more and there are hundreds of factors that can affect our web positioning.

SEO is one of the most complete disciplines that ideally every web programmer should know. The SEO requires knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and CSS programming as well as many foundations of web development and systems techniques.

Whether we want to create a new website or make modifications to the current web, it is highly recommended to develop website using SEO concepts so that, once put into production, the web will start positioning in the best possible way in the main internet search engines.

SEO Techniques:

• find appropriate keywords (using Google Adwords, for example)
• create valuable, grammar free and non-duplicated content
• use a blog to create a community and build loyalty
• optimize the headers of the website
• use sitemaps
• Take care of the alternative text of images and metatags.

When you try to understand for the first time how SEO or web page optimization works, it is difficult to know where to start. There is a lot to digest. And just when you think you “know” something, Google releases another algorithm update that makes it difficult for you to implement SEO techniques on your web pages.

But if you’re a web developer, there’s good news: Understanding some basic things will help you codify pages that perform well when crawled by Google.

Although they are both different fields, there is a very close relationship between SEO and Web development. You will only achieve a good position in search engines if you have adopted a series of good SEO practices in the development tasks. Next, we provide you a series of practical tips to coordinate SEO and web development, something essential today if you want your website to rank at the top of all the major search engines.

1. Download Speed

It is the most important factor in the Google ranking. The faster you download your page, the better results you have in your algorithm. Also, when someone is doing a search, they are more likely to read pages that go down faster, which mean that the content of your page is read by more people and you are more likely to place your link as a reference on other pages.

2. URL Structure

The URL structure is the part of the algorithm of most search engines. If the URL of your page is “friendly” (“semantic”, “pretty URL”), that is, it describes the content of the page and is easy to understand and remember, you are much more likely for users visiting your page, come back and recommend your page to others.

3. Usability

This is an important factor, as far as SEO is concerned. The better the usability of a Web page, the better web positions you will achieve. The page, both in its desktop version and in its mobile version, has to be simple to use for users, to be optimized and to load fast. Also, keep in mind that the longer we have the users on our page, the higher we will position our websites on the search engines.

4. Redesigns Factors!

If you were thinking of implementing a new design on your website, you should keep in mind that it can be counterproductive to your current SEO if you do not do it properly. Actually, the better Web Development, Web Design and SEO are coordinated, the better performance you will have in the search engines.

Before doing anything, it is advisable to analyze what is working, to preserve and enhance it with new image, because if you change the structure of the content, it is possible that the SEO does not offer you the results you had before. On the other hand, when we are working on the redesign of a page that does not have a good web positioning; it is the perfect time to optimize its structure and keywords.

5. Implement Good content on website

Search engines want to offer not only the most relevant content, but also the best quality of the search results. Likewise, quality can be measured in many ways, including grammar and spelling, ease of reading, comprehension, uniqueness and the lack of negative signals, such as excessive repetition of keywords.

If we define a strategy to include quality content on our webpage, such as creating articles according to the theme of our Website, we will be on the way to having a page that search engines “Prefer” the most.

6. Easy access to content

For your website to be well indexed in the search engines, try to create a content that has easy access to search engines, placing the most important (with the right keywords) in the highest part of your website structure. You should also consider as a goal to make a simple and very intuitive website structure for the user.

The objective of SEO is to create a system that provides the pages with the distribution of internal links in an appropriate way, so that search engines find that structure correct. With all this, having a content well indexed and perfectly structured, search engines will position your pages higher because they will understand that it is the best alternative they can offer to users in relation to the search they have done.

Conclusion

Just as SEO does not have a great artistic base to web development, we can understand that designers, programmers and layout designers do not have a great SEO base to think about web positioning, but in the end a successful project usually has a good positioning that gives it a relevant traffic, and this should be considered from the beginning of the project, since there are guidelines that can be followed in all phases of development and for the same time we can give birth to a more Google friendly website.

As you can see, SEO is very close to web development and means a lot to any Web Developer because it will make your pages much more search engine friendly.

Are you prepared to do an SEO analysis? Do you think that SEO is something simple or complicated?