Focusing on web development in isolation is like having a car without an engine—useless if you can’t drive it. Businesses need websites to promote their products and services, but search engine optimization (SEO) must be implemented for these websites even to be found. Web development and SEO are two essential but inseparable tools for contemporary businesses.
Web development and SEO may seem daunting without advanced technical knowledge, and their intersection can present additional complexity. How can web development contribute to SEO, and which development projects can deliver powerful organic search improvement?
This article will explain why SEO is critical to business visibility in terms of search rankings and why web development is vital to making this happen.
SEO: What you need to know for your next web development project
In its most fundamental form, SEO influences search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines use artificial intelligence to scour websites to determine whether certain criteria are present. Evidence of certain criteria results in higher search rankings on the SERP. Businesses want potential customers to see their organization ranked on the first page, preferably at the top of the page.
High visibility in terms of SERP relies on multiple things, starting with a comprehensive plan to develop SEO before making changes to the website. Once a plan has been established to support the business purpose and its digital marketing efforts, the web developer can begin site optimization to grow the organic ranking.
Site optimization requires a good content management system (CMS). Content helps drive SERP rankings because crawlers read the text to understand what the site is about, making content a priority. How links are structured and the overall information architecture of the site speaks to good housekeeping and discoverability, helping to improve rankings. Additional functions like ease of navigation, usability, speed, keyword usage, and mobile-friendliness add to how well the website is optimized for digital marketing purposes.
Although SEO is highly technical, web developers are fully equipped to integrate SEO to enhance the website’s visibility. Some common aspects that typically require technical web development support include:
- Upgrading your site’s structure
- Improving internal linking
- Increasing crawlability
- Enhancing navigation and functionality
- Making your site mobile-friendly
- Accelerating your site’s speed
A finely tuned digital marketing plan needs to see a united front between SEO and web developers. The next section covers the SEO projects that web developers commonly tackle to drive digital marketing success.
Web development for SEO: Optimization options
While you may think your site is optimized, it’s important not to ignore SEO when building a website. This section describes the various kinds of SEO web development projects that could meaningfully impact SERP performance.
At this stage, you can benefit from engaging independent talent on Upwork, who are qualified for each kind of SEO web development project. Independent web developers work with customers to draw up a plan before embarking on optimization strategies.
A thorough analysis of the site is undertaken, and development work is then aligned to support business goals. While businesses can attempt to implement improvements on their own, experience tells us that while the following improvements may appear simple, they are typically quite complex.
Upgrading your site’s structure
Upgrading site structure means looking at the functionality of the site. Part of functionality involves how well the site responds from the user’s perspective. Because your site provides information to customers, this information should be easy to navigate and find. When customers can explore the site easily to find what they want, they tend to stay longer. The other part of functionality and site structure requires a proven professional to implement tactics that ensure the site ranks highly on SERPs.
Creating a user-friendly site structure involves an intuitive process, which essentially means designing the site architecture from the customer’s perspective. If you can easily search the site from their viewpoint, it’s easier for the web developer to implement SEO to drive SERP rankings.
If you have an existing site, the web developer should copy the original version to a separate server rather than making changes to the live site. If you’re in the process of creating a new website, access an independent professional back-end developer to work in collaboration with a front-end developer for SEO purposes.
Enhancing navigation and functionality
Navigation refers to how easy it is to find things on your website. It’s like having a very simple road map to show you how to get to a certain street in a town (without using a GPS). Visitors want to quickly learn what your website is about. If the homepage is unclear about what you offer, they’ll move on just as quickly.
Even when the homepage is clear, information should be easily discoverable and accessible. A site structured intuitively will aid visitors in finding what they want without much thought. Likewise, crawlers adopt a quick scan approach to determine a site’s value. Much of this value relies on providing clear signs using text links, page content, and design elements for rapid recognition.
Errors such as content that cannot be found, busy media files, or embedded files from other sites can create functional problems when navigating the site. When things don’t work, functionality is negatively impacted. Usability relates to speed, design, ease of mobile access, and the user experience when landing on your site. Get any of these aspects wrong, and SEO will take a dip along with SERP rankings.
Improving internal linking
Improved internal linking and site structure contribute to functionality and SEO. You can think of the internal content design of your website as a well-organized system that categorizes everything so that it’s easy to find.
Just like building a house without making provisions for utilities, a website with a poorly designed content system is frustrating and effectively useless. Equally, if the external part of the house (website) is pretty but unsupported by practical components, it’s also meaningless.
Expert help will analyze how the pages on your website are associated and develop an organized structure to make link-finding effective. A hierarchical structure of page categories should be organized into smaller, more defined stages for powerful link-building.
Specific software tools are also used to audit the site to determine effective linking, correct URLs, orphan content, dead links, and other errors. Technical expertise in the form of independent professionals is typically necessary to build a valuable CMS system, superior site map, and link design to promote better SEO.
Increasing crawlability
Web crawlers are like little robotic detectives that snoop around your website. These crawlers are designed to identify and collect information to determine if and where your page will rank on search engines. To get good rankings, your site content must be accurately linked (no errors) and well indexed.
Technical site analysis is typically conducted by experts, using specific software to reveal HTTP errors. You miss out on opportunities for improved SEO and ranking when errors exist, like broken links, noindex/nofollow directives, redirect pages, missing metadata, duplicate tags, or incorrect content headings.
Worse, good pages can be missed when building link equity if the content is not clearly discernible by crawlers, such as heading similarities or headings being too short. Crawlers will bypass what could have been an excellent chance to add value to your website if these errors are left unfixed.
The software also matters when delivering content that is easily discoverable by crawlers. Experienced web developers know that certain software is discouraged by search engines as it doesn’t promote crawlability.
Constant crawling of the site should be undertaken to maintain maximum crawlability. Regular maintenance in this area promotes the possibility of search engines attributing as much ranking power to the site as possible. It’s recommended to engage independent talent to achieve this goal.
Making your site mobile-friendly
It’s predicted that more than 295 million people will access the internet with mobile phones by 2023. Since mobile internet access has grown, the need to make your website mobile friendly has similarly increased. Responsiveness to mobile access has become an essential element of SEO rankings, as most customers use their smartphones to access the internet. If customers cannot use a mobile version of your website, they’ll move on to a competitor’s site.
Because this aspect is so important, businesses should evaluate how their websites display on mobile phones. What level of user experience is delivered due to the design will determine whether they visit again or decide to turn to a competitor. What strategies are used to produce a positive experience depend on whether the design is standard or a mobile subdomain is used.
However, mobile subdomains are known to contribute to SEO problems rather than adding value. The reason for this is that a subdomain is read as a second website by search engines. In contrast, using a subfolder to produce a mobile-friendly site that enhances SEO is the simpler choice. If a subdomain is used, URL structures must be altered so that crawlers do not recognize this as copied content. Knowing which secure certificates to purchase for a subdomain is also critical.
Choosing the right developer to make your website mobile friendly means asking the right questions. Find out whether your web developer is familiar with mobile SEO and software to manage the technical side of your SEO project.
Accelerating your site’s speed
Everyone enjoys a website that downloads quickly. You can use software to test the speed of your site and get technical help to analyze server configurations. You should also find out if the server uses tools to improve speed, such as GZip Compression, to increase the network transfer of data. If you’re unsure, you can use a service like WebPageTest to see if your web host uses the compression tool.
Bottlenecks are often caused by server issues, as are time to first byte (TTFB) issues. Server technicians can quickly tell you whether these problems originate on the server. If not, you’ll need to look for professional help to speed up your website. An expert will advise whether conversion rate optimization (CRO) is needed after looking at web analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify what is slowing the site down.
Build your site for SEO with the world’s top developers
SEO and SERP ratings are a major element of any digital marketing effort. Making changes to your website typically requires experienced web developers. Specialized back- and front-end development goes into creating a rich SEO environment that is user friendly, appeals to customers, and attracts higher SERP rankings. When your website is optimized, so are your business opportunities.
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