For Developers: SEO Cheat-Sheet Part.1
1.Understand process
The first rule to succeeding in something is to take time to do your research. If you’re here then you are on the right way! However it would be great to read a little bit about how SEO works and why companies are so obsessed with it. There are many articles on what matters most to bots when they are crawling your website and what Google wants to see.
Learning what SEO is will help you build a picture of the entire process you need to go through which would make your working process a lot easier. Search Engine Algorithms change frequently though, so you always need to look for recent articles that are up to date and do not hesitate to check other people’s advice up.
2.Clear heading structure
A clear heading structure is of great importance when it comes to SEO. You might think that what the users see is the only part which matters, but when it comes to building an optimized website you need to be a bit more careful.
Use heading H1 – H6, making sure they are following their order:
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1 2 3 4 5 6 |
<h1>Biggest title which is most important to you</h1> <h2>Another big title</h2> <h3>A title</h3> <h4>Something you want people to see</h4> <h5>Important</h5> <h6>Important, but less important than H5</h6> |
Your headings should follow a pyramidal structure. As with all pyramids there should be only one H1 ( Google has recommended this a few times in the past), and the other heading tags should follow.
3.URLs
Using clear URLs is one of the most important things when you are writing your code. First of all Google actually values when your links are clean and it can improve your website ranking. Even though it’s a minor factor, clean URLs are an easy-to-do task which can not only bring your website up in the search engine results but gives a much better user experience.
Best practice follows:
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1 |
protocol://domain-name.top-level-domain/path |
Example SEO friendly:
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https://dreamix.eu/services/custom-software-solutions |
Example SEO unfriendly:
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https://domain.com/cat/?cid=7078 |
Additionally, when someone posts a link to your website, that is pretty valuable to search engines. And you know what matters to Search Engines? The anchor text. By having clear URLs you might actually include keywords that are valuable to your business in some anchor texts, which would also have SEO value.
That is why you should use keywords in your URLs. Example: if you are offering software development services, the URL to your page can be:
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https://domain.com/software-development-services |
4.Site Speed
Google has said that site speed plays a role in a website’s ranking. In order to increase the speed of your website there are some tricks recommended by SEO gurus.
- Optimize your code – removing unused parts of code, unnecessary commas, spaces and characters can increase the speed of your website. Additionally, you should try removing formatting, comments, etc.
- Response time for redirects – reducing time will be much easier with fewer redirects, because in the case of a redirect the page takes more time to load, thus increasing loading time.
- Optimal server response time – The optimal server response time is under 200ms. Make sure you check these metrics and take the necessary actions if your website needs further optimization.
- Optimal images – You need to have the size of your images in mind and compress them, if needed, so they wouldn’t be unnecessarily large. That would only slow down your website, without providing any benefit to your business.
- Enable compression – Wondering how to speed up your large pages? You could just “zip”them. For compression most people use Gzip. That step is quite important as it could increase your site speed by 70%.
5.Title tags and meta description tags
Title tags and meta descriptions are quite important when it comes to SEO. Not only can they boost your CTR (click-through-rate), but they also help bots understand what your website is about. That is why, once again, when writing title tags and meta descriptions, you should use keywords that are relevant to your website and business.
Title tags can be placed in the < head > section of your code.
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1 2 3 |
<head> <title>Example Title Tag</title> </head> |
They appear in anchor texts, on the tab of your browser and in search results like:
Meta descriptions are again an element placed in the < head > section of your code. They give a description of your website that is a bit longer than the title tag.
Meta descriptions appear in articles about your website and as description in the search results:
Meta tags are placed as they follow:
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<head> <meta name=”description” content=”Here is a precise description of my awesome webpage.”> </head> |
You can check Part 2 of “For developers: SEO Cheat-Sheet ”. P.S. Comment if you have any questions!
Theodora Palikarska
Marketing Manager at Dreamix. Experienced in Digital Marketing, B2B marketing and Project Management. Skilled communicator with a rich background and affinity towards psychology, personal development and motivation management. Creative and energetic person who has a natural entrepreneurial spirit. Feels inspired when being around people and doing things that have impact and meaning.
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