Useful technical SEO checklist for developers

by Janeth Kent Date: 15-05-2023 seo

Let's start from the beginning. What is SEO? When we talk about SEO we are talking about Search Engine Optimisation: we are talking about the organic positioning of a web page in search results. And when we say organic positioning we mean unpaid positioning.

SEO is a discipline, strategy or set of disciplines whose objective is to attract more quality traffic to a website.

Through seo we get search engines to offer your page in their results offering exactly what the user is requesting. Knowing that it is difficult for a user to get past the first page of Google results, you will understand how essential it is for your website to appear on that first

Modern SEO is so dynamic that almost anything could work, but that's not to say that everything will.

The first step is to make sure our page is accessible to search engines, and that their robots can see the page content.

In Google Search Console, we can see how your page appears to search engines.

Let's talk about of the URL. The URL is an integral part of user experience and SEO, it’s the first thing search engine crawlers see and, it comunicates them a lot regarding the page and its content.

That means that an URLs need to be clear an clean, easy to read, descriptive and ideally free of URL parameters.

The structure and words you use in your URLs are also very important for SEO. The URL’s path helps search engines understand the page’s relationship and importance to the rest of the site. The words used in the URL tells them how important that page is to a particular topic or keyword.

For a well-optimized URL structure, remember this 3 simple advices:

1. Be Short and descriptive

2. Use Hyphens instead of underscores

3. Use Keywords at the beginning

Your code is very important for search engines that also look at meta tags to learn things about your page.

Even if you don’t write your meta tags yourself (this is often done by marketers), you should still understand how they work for SEO. There are three meta tags that are especially important for SEO: the Title tag, the Meta description, Robots.

Use Redirects.

Developers need to move content around a site all the time, often hosting it at a new URL and setting up a redirect to send visitors to the new page. Redirects are good for your SEO because search engines like when there’s one canonical version of something.

Try to use redirect on your old pages pointing to your new pages: if you don’t use redirects, you risk search engines serving the wrong page in search results, and assigning trust and authority to outdated URLs.

Make a good XML sitemap.

In reality, Is far more than just a list a list of every URL on your site.

Search engines use the information in sitemaps to crawl sites more intelligently and efficiently so they won’t waste their crawl budget on unimportant or unchanged content. When done correctly, your basic sitemap looks like this:

<? xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8” ?>
<urlset alternate="" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/html”>     
<url>         
<loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>         
<lastmod>2021-5-01</lastmod>         
<changefreq >monthly</changefreq>         
<priority >0.9</priority>         
<xhtml:link rel="">    
</urlset >

Robots.txt

Robots.txt help crawlers navigate your site. The file contains lines of code that specify which user agents have access to which files, file types or folders. You can use Google Search Console to test your robots.txt file for syntax errors or other problems.

After this technical SEO checklist, what to do when these steps aren’t enough?

What do you do when you’ve created your sitemap and robots.txt file, optimized your URLs and meta tags, and set your mobile viewport, but the traffic still isn’t flowing?

We’ve put together some quick and easy hacks for developers to give SEO a jump start and get websites into search results.

Optimize Your Images

The first SEO hack to look into when optimizing your images is image size. Large images are one of the leading causes of slow page speed and long wait times.

When editing your images, try to scale them down to the smallest file size possible.

After creating the perfect image, the important thing is to load it in the fastest time possible to avoid backing visitors. Users visit your website seeking immediate solutions, and if the page loads slowly, they will look for another page, reducing your website’s traffic considerably. Having large and quality images on your website may load slowly on a mobile phone, hence needing a standard size for image display. The best solution for this is to allow the viewer to see a smaller, high-quality image of your product and give the option to view the enlarged image also.

Here's are some tools you can use online to help scrub extra stuff like EXIF data:

  • ImageOptim removes bloated metadata. Saves disk space & bandwidth by compressing images without losing quality.
  • JPEGmini reduce image file size without compromising quality.
  • Watermarkly is a free tool that allows users to resize the image according to their specifications.

You can also use your browser console or Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools to find unoptimized images slowing your pages down.

File Name and Alternative Text

The big challenge in using images for SEO has been telling search engines what’s in the image and how it’s relevant to the page. The good news is there are opportunities to optimize your images for keywords:

  • Filename: Avoid default filenames like “DSC673829.jpg” or “image_01.jpg” unless it’s somehow completely impossible. Try to use: imagename-whatrepresent.jpg ;-)

  • Alternative text: Alternative text, along with filename, is one of the most important parts of image SEO. It represents the machine-readable "content’ of the image, so it’s your opportunity to include your target keyword. Alt text should be concise, but making it too short will negate its benefits.

Switch to HTTPS

Making your site more secure is a really good idea for you and your users, so it’s a really good idea to get an SSL certificate anyways. However, not using HTTPS is also causing your website to lose positions in search results.

No, the first step is to crawl your website to find all of your URLs, both secure and not. You can use a traditional crawler, like Screaming Frog, that will compile a list of each URL and let you find all the non-HTTPS assets.

Or, use WooRank’s Site Crawl tool to find each instance of HTTPS pages hosting assets on HTTP URLs. These assets include:

  • Images
  • CSS files
  • Videos
  • Scripts
  • Frames

HTTPS URLs will show up in the Canonical section as canonical mismatches.

Search Entity Optimization

Semantic technologies are built on what are known as “entities.”

Entities are for example, people, places and things. How will entities help you hack your site’s SEO?

Using structured data markup like JSON-LD, RDF/XML or other RDF formats, you can optimize your brand’s entity to make the most of its entry in the Knowledge Graph.

Entity optimization is also vitally important for local businesses, or large businesses with local locations.

The semantic web is really important for local businesses so you need to take advantage of its abilities.

Use semantic markup like the LocalBusiness schema to add important context to the information about your business:

  • Hours of operation
  • Address
  • Phone number
  • Payments accepted
  • Price range
  • Ratings

AMP for Mobile Friendliness

Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project is a set of specifications designed to create pages for mobile devices that are easily used and navigated, render smoothly and load seemingly instantly.

AMP is made of three pieces working together:

  1. HTML: Basically normal HTML with custom properties for images, videos and frames; as well as restricted technical functions defined by the open source specs.

  2. AMP JavaScript Library: The AMP JS library manages the resource loading for the page, ensuring that any third-party resources don’t block the rendering of the page.

  3. Google AMP Cache: A dedicated content delivery network that fetches, stores and serves valid AMP pages and resources from one origin.

The whole project is designed to help make pages mobile friendly:

  • User experience: Since AMP JS loads page elements asynchronously, it ensures that the above-the-fold content appears before anything else. Plus, it requires that aspect rations be predetermined, so the browser knows what the page will look like before it starts rendering.

  • Page speed: There’s a reason AMP as “accelerated” right in the name. Load times for AMP pages are up to 85% lower than other pages.

Effective SEO tricks to improve the positioning of your website

Now that you know the importance of positioning, we are going to offer you some seo tricks, some recommendations to improve the seo of your website, which we have divided into 7 main ones.

Always start with Keyword Research

If you want to position your website in search engines, you have to tell them what they are going to find there. We provide them with this information through keywords, which is why it is essential to always start with good Keyword Research.

Keyword research consists of locating the best and most profitable keywords that can be adapted to our website in order to achieve an increase in traffic to it. The more quality traffic directed to a website, the more likely it is to generate a conversion, a sale, an affiliation.

For that location, for an effective Keyword Research, do not rely only on obvious keywords, but pay attention to those used by your competitors and long tail keywords, which are more specific.

Understand user search intent

To correctly attack the user's search intent we need to know what it is. The answer is easy: it is to understand the reason for a specific query made by a user: are they looking for a product, its advantages, how to use it?

Pay attention to one of the most important seo tricks because if Google detects that this search intent finds the requested (and relevant) content on your page, you will be improving your seo significantly.

Some search intentions are easy to determine and others not so easy to determine, but there are a series of modifiers that can help us to make our seo strategy a little more concrete. Modifiers such as "how" "where" "examples", "guide", will guide us. The modifiers and some tools such as Ahrefs or even the Google search box itself. By typing in a keyword it offers us search intentions of other users.

Internal links to other pages to improve retention rates.

The time a user spends on a website is relevant for Google. Consider that during this time the user browses and finds information of interest.

To improve the dwell time, the time spent on your site, have an attractive web design and include internal links. You can do this by linking blog articles with other blogs or even products and thus achieve cross-selling, increasing the purchase ticket.

Take care of your meta titles and meta descriptions, your CTR will thank you.

Get the attention of the user and search engines through meta titles (that arouse curiosity) and meta descriptions (that explain and summarise the content you are offering in a striking way). By paying attention to these two aspects, the click-through rate, your CTR will increase. And you know: the more clicks on links to your website, the more chances of generating a sale or conversion.

More clicks = more visits (paying attention to the bounce rate) = better seo positioning.

Last SEO tip: Create a careful linkbuilding strategy

The linkbuilding strategy has to be carefully prepared and focused on your goals, taking into account some mistakes you should avoid. If we talk about White Hat Seo, your linkbuilding strategy should be mainly based on:

- Guest blogging: publishing an article on another site with sufficient authority that shares the same authority with you through a link, placed in the body of the text or in the "about the author" section if the owner of the site allows you to do so.
- Specialised magazines with a good "reputation" and focused on your niche.
- Links coming from social networks.
- Content submission. Marketplaces, content aggregators, press release portals. Again, it is the authority of the sites that will improve or not your positioning.

 
by Janeth Kent Date: 15-05-2023 seo hits : 12494  
 
Janeth Kent

Janeth Kent

Licenciada en Bellas Artes y programadora por pasión. Cuando tengo un rato retoco fotos, edito vídeos y diseño cosas. El resto del tiempo escribo en MA-NO WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT.

 
 
 

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