4 Best Practices for Web Development
How you design your website greatly influences the success of your business online. In this article, we will discuss 4 best practices for web development to help you can build your business on the digital landscape.
Creating SEO-Enabled Websites
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the mechanism search engines (such as Google, Bing, etc.) use to index and rank websites. It helps customers search for relevant content and websites and seek products and services they want.
Studies have found that efficient SEO gives websites 20x times more traffic opportunities on both desktop and mobile compared to Pay-Per-Click advertising. It is of the few online marketing channels that continue to benefit websites over time once you set it up correctly.
Although content and proper use of keywords play a huge role in gaining the attention of search engines, how you structure and maintain content on the website is extremely crucial. Unless you optimize your website for SEO during development, the search engine can fail to access the web site’s content, thus affect the website’s digital presence.
As a web developer, you should ensure that your website follows all SEO best practices. For instance, it’s best to avoid using Flash for navigation on your website, since it makes web-crawling difficult for search engines. Besides that, Adobe is discontinuing support for Flash from December 2020, so using Flash on your website can create problems for you in the future. Instead, it’s best to use CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript for visual effects.
Place Scripts Outside of the HTML Document
While you code on your website, it’s important to externalize JavaScript and CSS code segments. Search engines analyze websites based on what in the HTML document. If you fill your HTML document with JavaScript and CSS code, it will add several extra lines of code.
These additional lines will mostly likely interrupt crawlers while they analyze the actual content of your website, making the website crawling slower. Since search engines can process website content with externalized JS and CSS files more quickly, it’s best to follow this practice while developing your website.
Use Unique Meta Data
Metadata plays a crucial role in categorizing content and indexing your website efficiently on the search engine. To optimize your website for better performance, it’s important to keep metadata such as page titles, descriptions, and keywords different.
It’s common for web designers to create a template for websites and then forget to modify the metadata. When this happens, several pages of the website end up using the original placeholder information in their design, making them appear as duplicates to search engine crawlers.
While creating your website, you should remember to create a separate metadata set for each web page. Doing so will help search engines get a better grasp of how your website is structured.
Use Heading Tags Properly
Leveraging different heading tags helps you optimize the structure of your web page content for the search engine. As a result, it can define the HTML document structure more clearly, helping search engines place a higher value on tags relative to what the visitor wants to see.
Consider using the <h1> tag for the main topic of the page. Likewise, you should every heading tag from <h2> to <h6> tags to define the content hierarchy and separate blocks of similar content. In most cases, it’s best to avoid using multiple <h1> tags on a single web page, as it can make your key topic seem diluted.
Final Words
Implementing web development best practices is essential for making a website succeed in the digital landscape. To learn more about website design and development best practices, feel free to follow my blog.