10 Search Engine Friendly Tips Before Hiring An SEO

10 Search Engine Friendly Tips Before Hiring An SEO

Website architecture has long been a major concern for search engine optimization professionals, but it has become even more so over the last few years. Architecture is a key component of a search engine friendly site development. It affects both how users interact with and analyze the content.

Moreover, website architecture should not only be considered by SEOs but by website developers, as well. If you are planning to create a new website, we recommend right from the start to create search engine friendly websites, even if you don't plan to hire a full-time SEO. In the absence of such a plan, SEO efforts can be hindered, resulting in higher development costs to fix the issues.

What is the purpose of this guide?

• Website Managers- You don't want to pay another set of eyes on your company's website if you're responsible for the design or marketing of the site. This guide will come in handy if you're responsible for both. When you provide this information to your developer, your site will almost be search engine friendly websites and ready for optimization and promotion once it becomes live, if they choose to follow it.

• Website Developers- This guide can be helpful especially if you work as an internal developer for a company or are a part of a development agency. By creating search engine-friendly websites, your clients can potentially save themselves thousands of dollars otherwise spent on a Web marketer to assess their site. It's important to keep in mind that these items aren't SEO or Web marketing. They're just foundational information that will make SEO and Web marketing more efficient.

• Web Marketing Consultants- If you have the opportunity to consult during the development process or to pick up the ball after the site has been launched and goes live, you should focus on the issues listed here first so that other optimization and promotion can be far more effective. Before any marketing can begin, these issues should be addressed.

Search-Engine-Friendly Website Development Guide 1. Encrypt your website using HTTPS. In the past, HTTPS/SSL security was reserved exclusively for e-commerce pages to protect sensitive data, like credit card information.

Google, on the other hand, is factoring HTTPS into its ranking algorithm as a push for "HTTPS everywhere".

2. Ensure that your security certificate is up to date. Expired security certificates can cause problems for your visitors, giving them all kinds of annoying warnings in their browsers that will scare them away. Keep an eye on the renewal of your certificates to avoid this problem.

3. Spidering of the site is allowed via robots.txt Occasionally, when a website is launched, the developer forgets to update the robots.txt to permit search engines to index the site. Check your robots txt file to ensure it does not "block" search engines from crawling your site. If your Web marketing company ignores this file, you might wonder why you haven't gotten the traffic you should.

4. It is vital to define your document type. The document type tells the browsers how to translate each page. If the document type is not declared, the browsers have to guess.

Search engines use this to make sure they are analyzing your site correctly by making sure they have a clear idea of what's on each page. Most of the time, its guess will be accurate, but some things just won't translate well.

5. If your page is not translated correctly by the browser or the search engine, it could affect your rankings. Valid HTML ensures everyone sees what you intend. Invalid HTML does not affect rankings but can cause your page to be translated incorrectly.

6. Search engine spiders rely on this information to help render the pages correctly, so they know where to look for each part of the code. Therefore, don't hide your CSS and JavaScript files. If search engines are unable to differentiate between different types of content, they may not assign the proper value to key components.

7. You shouldn't use HTML frames. Admittedly, this is an old-school Web development technique that you don't see nearly as much these days, but it's worth remembering if you're working with an older developer. But, in truth, if you hire a developer who uses frames, you're hiring the wrong one.

8. It's generally a wise practice to remember to include descriptive alt attributes as you add images to your site. This is a minor detail, but I just want you to remember it as you add images.

9. When you redesign your website to search engine friendly site development, you will inevitably need to redirect some old URLs. Before you remove the old site, make a list of all existing URLs so you can 301 redirect any URLs that may have changed or no longer work. 301 redirecting these URLs to new addresses allows you to capture the authority value those pages may have earned in the past and assign it to the corresponding new addresses.

10. Any bad URLs should return a 404 code, and the 404 page should be properly designed if you missed any 301 redirects.