Best SEO Practices for Developers: Put Your Skills to Work
This article is for developers who want to take into account website promotion features and avoid redoing things after the end of development.
Traditionally, the development team discusses and creates a project’s architecture and business logic. But website promotion is postponed until the last stage and is handled by the SEO team. This approach to building a project can have fatal consequences. At the production stage or even after deployment, there’s often a need to make edits to the project. These edits may include changes to meta tags and attributes for links as well as improvements in the link structure.
We’ve prepared our own checklist with the main things you need to consider at the development stage.
Titles and meta descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are bits of HTML code in the header of a web page. They help search engines understand the contents of a page.
<head>
<title>What developers have to know about SEO</title>
<meta name="description" content="Article for developers team who wants to create good optimized website.">
</head>You may think, What else is there to add?
To begin with, you see snippets in the search engine results. We talked about this in our SEO web development tutorial for beginners. Snippets usually contain a title and description.
Usually, but not always. At times, when a search robot identifies a title as irrelevant to the text on the page, the snippet can be automatically generated based on the page content.
At first glance, this is a problem for copywriters and SEO experts rather than for developers. However, there are cases when developers should not only add the <title> tag to the page but should also generate a title and description automatically on the backend depending on the logic of the project.
It’s best for developers to generate unique titles and descriptions. But this doesn’t guarantee that they’ll appear in the snippet. For example, if the titles differ by one word only, there’s a chance that the search robot will mark them as irrelevant.
Examples:
The best cake shops in New York
The best cake shops in Stamford
The best cake shops in Manchester