A new web project is a new application in its own right. Technicians, integrators, and developers must be involved from the first sketches of the need. It is about the performance of your SEO and your position on Google.
Every SEO project is unique because every business is unique. The company carrying out a project has its constraints: business sector, competition, marketing positioning, commercial objectives, available resources… and specific SEO. One of the common denominators of this great diversity of projects is integrating the technical implementations and the consultant’s recommendations or the SEO agency in charge of the project. The technician in charge implements these improvements directly via the CMS or the “ready-to-use” web solution if they allow them. If this is not the case, specific web development is required. Whatever the situation: any SEO specialist should count on a web development agency’s expertise to achieve its goals and harness the full potential!
WHY IS SEO DEPENDENT ON TECHNIQUE (INTEGRATION, WEB DEVELOPMENT, ETC.)?
You have freed up a budget for the SEO of your website. After a long study of your case, the SEO specialist gives you dozens and dozens of modifications and technical implementations to be made to improve your visibility! But, in the end: who should be responsible for making the technical improvements? Without a developer or a web integrator or a web agency by your side, your SEO project will quickly become a failure … or will not achieve the objectives set. This mess is often the object of tensions, delays, or loss of trust between the SEO agency, the client, and the entity in charge of the website’s development.
It would be adventurous (if not completely irresponsible) to entrust your site to your SEO consultant without being interested in the technical side of things. It is essential for integrators, web developers, and SEO agencies to develop a technically sound site, to achieve better positioning on Google. Ask for guarantees from your SEO expert and your web provider before starting your project!
WHEN DO SEO AND WEB DEVELOPMENT WORK TOGETHER?
Each technical error on a site penalizes it’s referencing on search engines. Many mistakes can be avoided by coordinating the web developer/integrator and the SEO expert’s actions. For your website’s organic traffic to be important, it is important to make sure that the web development manager and the SEO manager can work together. Concretely, what does effective cooperation between SEO and web development look like? When are they called upon to work together?
WHEN CREATING A WEBSITE
Ideally, the process of creating a website or online store includes one or more organic SEO specialists from the start. With this, they offer SEO guidelines to developers regarding the page’s technical elements or the content that should be there. Their work is necessary at the design and implementation stages of the website – they check if all the elements have been prepared following best development practices and will not negatively affect the site’s positioning on Google and other search engines. Good practices include Hn markup (titles), URLs, metadata optimization, site speed, alternative image tags, etc.
DURING A WEBSITE REDESIGN
A website redesign is not just a graphic redesign. It is also an opportunity to rework its digital acquisition strategy as a whole, especially natural referencing. Forgetting to integrate an SEO audit and good technical practices inevitably leads to a loss of positions and natural traffic. By communicating regularly with each other, the web developer and the SEO expert make sure to move forward at the same speed and have the same information level. The developer or web integrator checks that the SEO recommendations are applicable, and the SEO validates the changes made to the site to not be harmful to its good positioning.
You will thus obtain the certainty that the project is going well. It covers its entire functional scope. It will meet all the expectations dictated in the specifications; above all, the Internet users!
THROUGHOUT THE LIFECYCLE OF YOUR SITE
Suppose the creation and redesign of a site necessarily require the intervention and cooperation of a web developer and an SEO expert. In that case, your structure’s website needs regular monitoring and skills over these two professionals’ long term. Search engines are developing and changing their algorithms every day to meet the expectations of Internet users. Google, therefore, likes sites that live and evolve by regularly adding pages and content (essential!), integrating new features, or simply changing the design of certain pages.
Each change can create errors or blocking factors for your site’s SEO. The best way to guard against this is to perform a regular full SEO audit. The SEO specialist then identifies areas for improvement and obstacles to improve its positioning in organic search results. This list of technical recommendations would be useless without the web developer’s expertise or the integrator who implements the technical optimizations.
HOW DOES WEB DEVELOPMENT INFLUENCE SEO?
Each web referencing project must integrate a technical SEO audit from its conception. This study focuses on specific elements related to the analyzed site and a list of essential elements that can block a good web referencing if they are not taken into account.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the priority points to check for SEO:
WEBSITE MENU
An essential navigation element, the site menu, is often chosen in connection with business objectives, site design, and SEO. However, web development remains crucial at this stage: the menu must be developed in such a way as to be perfectly visible and understandable by search engines. A very extensive menu with hundreds of links can become an obstacle to good Page Speed. A not optimized menu sends a very negative signal to Google, where Page Speed is becoming more important.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
In 2021, it is inconceivable not to have a website adapted to mobiles (tablets, smartphones, etc.). The web developer or web designer’s role is to make the site perfectly accessible and pleasant from these terminals. Google has implemented “Mobile-First Indexing”, a new way of browsing sites with crawlers. Googlebot now crawls the mobile version of a page first, rather than the desktop version, to assess each site’s relevance.
STRUCTURED DATA
Embedding structured data on a website has a big impact on SEO. This is the information automatically selected by Google from your site’s source code to make it appear in an orderly fashion in search results, under the name of the sites listed. An SEO expert will likely recommend their implementation by verifying the accuracy of these. Often, mistakes happen. In this case, Google robots cannot read them correctly and interpret them in the search results (SERP). They are useless! And your site is cut to the SERP!
PAGE LOAD SPEED
A very important element from an SEO point of view but sometimes neglected by some developers, The web page’s loading speed is constantly at the center of debates and arbitrations between the web development manager and the SEO manager. Neglecting the problems linked to the fast loading of pages could have, in certain cases, a negative effect on the positioning (UX, crawl budget…).
A real SEO specialist will report page load issues, help diagnose and eliminate their causes. These malfunctions can result from external resources or plugins that slow down page loadings, such as the weight of graphic elements or the existence of unnecessary fragments of HTML and CSS code.
PICTURES
The photos on the site may seem trivial, but they are really important from an SEO perspective. An SEO consultant working with the web development team will ensure that the site’s images are the optimal size that will not slow down the page’s loading using the Web format.
The SEO consultant will also ensure that the graphics are optimized for SEO. This requires setting up a good wording of the ALT tags and the correct address of the resource – extremely important or even mandatory in e-commerce where organic traffic can be obtained via an image search.
Do you want to increase your online business exposure and look for Web Development in Pakistan to upgrade your web design? Contact us to get competing Web Design and Development services.
Pro Digi 