To achieve desired SEO results, both on-page and off-page SEO practices are necessary. In order to include on-page SEO strategies in your website, the involvement of web developers is required. This article will provide a basic understanding of all the basic SEO practices that a web developer must know to make their web development SEO-friendly. 

If one is planning to include perform SEO activities on his/her website. It is necessary to plan from domain and hosting server selection onwards. When it comes to web development, there will arise more and more requirements. If these are not done in the initial development stage, then lots of reworks will be required in the future.

SEO is to improve the website’s organic traffic and encourage visitors to visit your website again. So, it is necessary to showcase informative content in an attractive and easily recognizable appearance. This is what a website designer must do. This is not just important for SEO, it is also good for your website’s overall performance. The task of the designer is to create an attractive user interface that is important for visitors but not much for the search engine. But, for web developers, their on-page activities are mostly intended for improving search engine rankings. The below mentioned are some good SEO practices for web developers.

• Enhance the Security of your website: SSL is a standard security technology that creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser to enable secure data transfer. HTTPS will protect the website from hacker attacks and this makes your website more trustworthy. The task of web developer is to ensure that the SSL is included in place without any errors.
• XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt: Including XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt will make your website indexed easily. XML Sitemap lists all the important pages of your website and Google will find and crawl through these pages. Likewise, Robots.txt files are included to inform the search engine crawlers, which are the pages that can be accessed on your website. The Robots.txt file is intended to prevent the overloading of your site with requests.
• WebPage URL Structure: The website needs to follow the standard URL structure that includes only concise lower case words relevant to the page without any characters, spaces, or underscores. Also, the URL structure needs to follow the content hierarchy in order to make the website navigable.
• Server Status Codes: The web developer needs to make sure that all the pages of your website is rendering 200 server code (OK Success). If any 3xx or 4xx codes are found, redirect or remove them.
• Improving Site Speed: Slow loading of any website will not just affect SEO, but it can damage user experience and conversion rates. The developers need to optimize the site speed by keeping the code light, reducing the image size, removing unnecessary plugins & extensions, compressing and minifying JS and CSS, and selecting the ideal hosting environment.
• Content Management System: Content is the king in SEO. So, understanding the content plan and needs of content creators is important while developing the content management system.