8 Tips to Improve SEO & Web Development Relationship

SEO and website development, despite being separate sides of an equation, go hand in hand when it comes to optimization for higher ROI, conversion, great user experience, and usability. Together, these two can have an outstanding impact on your company's bottom line.

A lot of businesses, especially those that are planning to shift from brick-and-mortar stores to the digital realm, have no idea about how to improve the SEO and web development relationship. If you are one of them, keep reading.

In this blog, Techosquare - a leading website development company in India - will share a list of 8 tried and tested tips for improving the SEO and website development relationship. These ideas will help you ensure that the money you are about to spend doesn't go down the drain and that your website functionality, design, and SEO complement each other.

Are you ready to explore our list of tips to improve the SEO web development relationship? Let's go!

#1 Optimize website source code

The first and foremost thing that you should do to build bridges between SEO and web development is to optimize website source code. Why? The source code lets web browsers make sense of the website content. Optimizing the source code with SEO in mind will help web crawlers use the information to rank your website on search engines and decide where to show it in search results. Optimizing your website's source code will also help you reduce bounce rate and lower the average time on your web pages.

Ask your developer to do the following things in order to optimize your website source code for SEO:

Add a title tag on each page of your website
Keep meta description length between 130 and 160 characters
Use structured data in your HTML source code
Put heading and canonical tags to use
Add alt text makes your website more user-friendly
Utilize robot meta directives to provide crawlers instruction for crawling or indexing web pages

#2 Make website mobile-friendly

According to Statista, the number of unique mobile internet users currently stands at 4.32 billion. This figure indicates that more than 90% of people around the world use smartphones to go online. In 2022, mobile-friendliness has become a matter of web development and SEO. In fact, search engines like Google and Bing rank mobile-friendly websites higher.

The best way to address the mobile-first scenario is with responsive design. During the development of your website, ask your developer to:

Set appropriate responsive breakouts
Use a fluid grid for keeping your site visually consistent across multiple devices.
Take touchscreens into consideration
Make typography adjust to screen size and be easily readable on various devices
Test responsiveness on different smartphones
Optimize images and videos
Be careful with the navigation

All these tips will help you make your website mobile-friendly and improve the relationship between SEO and development.

#3 Improve readability

Clear, concise content is crucial for both website performance and SEO. It not only makes it easy for your audience to scan through your website but also ensures that search engines understand your content easily.

During the website development process, ask your developer to collaborate with the designer to pick font styles and sizes that match your brand identity. And that's not it! Also, ask him to make headway with the following aspects:

Add ample space between lines. The optimal height line is 24px.
Check text and background for sufficient color contrast.
Use thin lines to enhance website design quality
Put subheadings in use
Add bullet points where required
Comprise each paragraph with 3 to 4 sentences

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#4 Reduce the size of web pages

Just like being overweight increases our body fat and put us at risk for health problems, extra 'weight' in web pages affects the relationship between SEO and website development. According to a report by Solarwinds Pingdom, 24% of users abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load and 38% of users leave a web page if it takes 5 seconds.

Heavy web pages directly influence the performance of your website. Request your web developer to keep the page size less than 2MB (100KB if your website has .HTML pages). Also, consider the following tips to reduce the weight of web pages on your site:

Resize and compress images
Use CSS sprites
Remove unnecessary custom fonts
Remove unnecessary or redundant data from the website
Use a content delivery network (CDN)

#5 Work on navigation

One of the most important tips to consider for improving the SEO and web development relationship in 2022. Can you locate and go to an unknown destination without using Google Maps? The answer is NO! Just like right navigation in the real world ensures that you arrive at the destination without any issues, website navigation ensures that the site is accessible and usable for users.

We know some readers right now are thinking, “What about SEO? How exactly will it help me improve it?” The well-structured website navigation makes it easy for search engine crawlers to come across site pages and crawl your content. It will help them understand what pages are essential and can help you shape page authority.

Consider the following tips for optimizing navigation while developing your website:

Make the navigation bar easy to find. Place it either on the header, top left or top right corner, or sidebar
Ensure the navigation bar is easy to use on mobile phones
Use clear, concise, and descriptive navigation titles
Use breadcrumbs
Put sticky navigation to use
Avoid using a complicated menu structure with categories and subcategories. Divide them clearly from each other
Make sure your search bar works well and let your users find their desired webpage within seconds

#6 Make each web page unique

Stephen Richards once said, “Stand out from the crowd, be yourself.” Just like being unique provides you with a special place in society, making each web page unique will help you increase relevance and boost search engine ranking. Make sure the content you are adding to each web page of your site is exclusive. Content duplicacy can damage SEO prospects.

Keep the typography and layout of web pages consistent though. However, you can oversee minor color scheme changes according to specific categories. Use unique elements while developing and designing a web page for diverse product categories or service pages.

#7 Add footer links to webpages

Another useful tip for businesses is to improve the SEO and web development relationship. In 2013, Chartbeat looked at the scroll behavior of 25 million visits and found that many visitors scrolled down hundreds of thousands of pixels just to go through links present at the bottom of web pages. In recent years, footers have proven to be crucial to website performance, especially since more and more people are using smartphones to surf the internet.

Just like a header, a footer lets you put the spotlight on the most important business, product, and category pages. It helps visitors find relevant information about a company and let them navigate through your website without hassle. And when it comes to SEO, it acts as a safety net for your website users and helps your business improve conversion rates by representing a strong roadmap for the rest of your website.

Include the following information in the footer in order to improve the overall SEO performance and usability of the website:

Logo
Navigation
Contact details
Support
Copyright, terms of service, and privacy policy
Company information
Social media channels
Call-to-action

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#8 Use flash wisely

Our list of tips to improve the SEO and web development relationship will be considered incomplete without talking about this aspect. We have seen many websites using Flash to show animation on their web pages. In fact, some even use it to display text to their visitors. What they don't know is that text on a Flash website cannot be read by search engines. Yes, you read it right!

SEO is all about content and links and Flash doesn't harmonize well with these. It doesn't let you create any unique URL for separate pages. What's even worse, Flash doesn't work on smartphones. Meaning, it can cause a serious amount of frustration to your audience.

We don't recommend using Flash tech for developing a website. Instead, switch to HTML5. It can help you produce Flash-like elements in a far superior manner. Even if you want to use Flash on your website, use it wisely. For example, to display a video or image in the background.

SEO and website development: Final words

Above are tips to improve the SEO and web development relationship in 2022. Whether you are a novice web developer looking forward to improving his development skills, a content creator thinking of starting her own blog, or an entrepreneur planning to deploy an ecommerce solution, it is a good idea to keep these good web development and SEO practices in mind.

By doing so, you will be able to make a great first impression on visitors and enhance your chances in search rankings. Hire the best web development firm for your business if nothing makes sense. Techosquare has a team of highly experienced web developers and designers that will help you create a functional and eye-pleasing website that ranks well on search engines.

Got any queries to ask? Send them to info@techosquare.com and have them answered by our experts.