The responsibilities of a web developer are broader than merely designing and developing an software.
Taking care of SEO is something that falls under this category.
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What is SEO, and why do you need it?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
This term itself gives out what SEO exactly is.
Now that the basics are covered lets start going through the essential SEO tips for web developers.
The two most relevant tags for SEO are title and description tags.
If you are writing the meta tags of a website yourself, you oughta consider the role of keywords.
when you obtain identified the relevant keywords, you should use them in the web pages content.
The most important places to use the identified keywords are the web pages title tag and H1 tag.
You should also use the keywords inside H2 and other headlines and paragraphs.
However, they have less impact on the search engines ranking algorithm than the ones first mentioned.
Be careful not to overuse keywords on a web page.
Ranking algorithms see the overuse of keywords as an attempt to mislead the algorithm and penalty you for it.
Whats a good ratio for keywords vs. words?
Thats the million-dollar question.
Title tag
The most effective position to place the keywords in a title tag is its beginning.
If thats not possible, use the keyword anywhere inside the title.
A well-optimized title tag should not be longer than 60 characters, including spaces and other special characters.
Meta description tag
Description tags dont have much weight on the outcome of the ranking algorithm.
it’s possible for you to also prevent the crawling of unimportant pages on the website.
But this is not entirely successful.
If there is another page that links to the current page, it could still get indexed.
A crawler usually crawls the linked pages inside a page its already visiting.
In such cases, you’re free to passnofollowas the value of therelattribute.
However,Google announcedthat they are usingnofollowas only a hint, not a rule, since 2020.
The vocabulary used for writing structured data is mostly similar to the one defined inschema.org.
However, you should refer to the search engines documentation to see the exact format accepted by it.
Refer toGoogles developer documentationto find out more details about different structured data formats and content types.
Googles Lighthouseis a great tool to measure your sites performance.
Its performance score is not based only on the actual page speed under perfect web connection conditions.
It factors how your site performs over even crappy 3G connections.
Lighthouse is a great tool to measure how your page load time would feel to an actual user.
you’re free to use several approaches to increase the load speed of a web page.
A mobile-friendly website provides a better user experience to mobile users.
There are three main approaches it’s possible for you to take to make your website more mobile-friendly.
Use a mobile subdomain
Some web apps use a separate subdomain for mobile users.
Usually, the subdomain has a name similar to mobile.example.com or m.example.com.
This approach takes a lot more time and effort for implementation.
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