Top SEO Checklist to Make Your Website Development Search Engine Friendly

Website development is a one time job. You develop your site and keep it as it is at least for a few months or years. It is always good to apply a few standard practices while developing your website. Specifically, applying SEO standards must be one of the high priority tasks at the time of web development. This will not only make your website search engine friendly, but also user-friendly, which will give you ranking benefits, and conversion benefits, too. So let’s explore a few important points to keep in mind at the time of website development.

Get an SSL Certificate

If you have an eCommerce website, you must get the SSL certificate. If you don’t own one, still it is a good idea to get a secure certificate for your website. According to one of the announcements made by the Google, the SSL certificate is one of its ranking factors. However, not the major one.

Use Proper Page Redirection

It would be always the best practice to not generate multiple URL versions of the same webpage For example; in many cases home page has more than one version as below:

example.com
example.com/index.htm

example.com/index.htm

Sometimes, it happens unknowingly. This type of small looking mistake can create disasters for your website. The Google considers all different URLs of same page as the different pages. It will consider it as the competitors and will also create the duplicate content issue.

 The solution is, make permanent redirection, using the 301 redirect, of different URL versions of the single and preferred version. You can also add the canonical tag to tell search engines that which is the preferred version.

Use Image Optimization

Your graphics and images can work as another channel to bring traffic to your website. Apply a few easy to use tactics to optimize your images.

1. Give proper image names. For example, if your image is about responsive web design, the image file name should be: responsive-web-design, filet type. Here file type is your image’s file type which can be any such as .jpeg, .gif.
2.  Ensure to set the image “Alt” tag by applying the proper keywords, but Do NOT Spam it by Keyword Stuffing.

Optimize Your Page with HTML Attributes

The optimized webpage is the first door to your business from the search engines. Set following attributes to leverage benefits of good rankings:

• Set title tag
• Set meta description
• Use H1 and other header tags sparingly

Add Sitemaps

It will take very little efforts, but will give outstanding benefits. Make sure to add sitemap.html, which will guide your lost visitors to reach to the webpage they are looking for to make conversation. The sitemap.xml will ensure that each URL gets crawled by the search engine bots and make its place in their search index.

Check SEO Days are over?

These are the top 5 SEO checklist points to be kept in mind at the time of the website development so you can save the future efforts of your SEO team by applying these right on. It will ensure to start gaining the SEO benefits, too.