{"id":2300,"date":"2021-01-14T12:10:28","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T12:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1334112"},"modified":"2021-01-14T12:10:28","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T12:10:28","slug":"how-to-develop-a-web-app-with-seo-in-less-than-10-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=2300","title":{"rendered":"How to develop a web app with SEO in less than 10 minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The responsibilities of a web developer are broader than merely designing and developing an application. In addition to adding the right set of features to the app, you have to take proactive actions to make sure the users will embrace it.<\/p>\n

Taking care of SEO is something that falls under this category.<\/p>\n

If you want your app to perform well in search engine rankings, incorporating SEO techniques when developing the application is a necessary evil for every web developer.<\/p>\n

This essential guide to SEO for web developers will get you up to date on the latest SEO techniques you should be using while developing a web app in less than 10 minutes.<\/p>\n

First off, for those who are not entirely familiar with the concept of SEO, let\u2019s go through the basics.<\/p>\n

What is SEO, and why do you need it?<\/h2>\n

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This term itself gives out what SEO exactly is.<\/p>\n

When you type some search keywords on a browser search box, the search engine has to decide how to display the results, which web pages list in the top 10 results, and which ones next.<\/p>\n

If you are looking to attract users who are looking for content similar to what you are offering, ranking as close as possible to the top of the list of results is your best bet to get them to visit your site.<\/p>\n

Search engine algorithms use data it has stored about each web page to decide which web pages provide the content closest to what the user\u2019s keywords are looking for. The purpose of SEO is to convince the search engine algorithms that your web page is the one that has the content the user is looking for.<\/p>\n

[Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data<\/span><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

In addition to the web page\u2019s content, ranking algorithms prefer to display websites that offer the best user experience to the top of the results page.<\/p>\n

Combine these two requirements, and you get the need for web developers who take care of the SEO aspect of a website during development. As a developer, your responsibility lies in SEO\u2019s technical side, which requires some code changes, additions, and tweaks for optimization.<\/p>\n

Now that the basics are covered let\u2019s start going through the essential SEO tips for web developers.<\/p>\n

Search engine crawlers look at certain HTML tags on a web page to identify the type of content it is serving. The two most relevant tags for SEO are title and description tags.<\/p>\n

If you are writing the meta tags of a website yourself, you need to consider the role of keywords.<\/p>\n

What are keywords?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In search engine terms, keywords are the phases users type into the search box of a browser.<\/p>\n

To draw search engine users to your web page, you need first to identify the keywords users looking for content similar to what you are offering are searching.<\/p>\n

Once you have identified the relevant keywords, you should use them in the web page\u2019s content. The most important places to use the identified keywords are the web page\u2019s title tag and H1 tag.<\/p>\n

You should also use the keywords inside H2 and other headlines and paragraphs. However, they have less impact on the search engine\u2019s ranking algorithm than the ones first mentioned.<\/p>\n

Be careful not to overuse keywords on a web page. Ranking algorithms see the overuse of keywords as an attempt to mislead the algorithm and penalty you for it. What\u2019s a good ratio for keywords vs. words? That\u2019s the million-dollar question.<\/p>\n

Title tag<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most effective position to place the keywords in a title tag is its beginning. If that\u2019s not possible, use the keyword anywhere inside the title.<\/p>\n

A well-optimized title tag should not be longer than 60 characters, including spaces and other special characters.<\/p>\n

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Meta description tag<\/strong><\/p>\n

Description tags don\u2019t have much weight on the outcome of the ranking algorithm. But since the description you provide is shown on the SERP to the users to get an idea about the content on the web page, it should be written to compel the users to click on the link to your web page.<\/p>\n

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Robots.txt file and robots meta tags<\/strong><\/p>\n

Use the robots.txt file to tell the search engines not to crawl the pages specified in the file. Usually, blocking the crawlers from a particular web page is used to stop the crawlers\u2019 requests from overwhelming the app\u2019s server. Do this only if reducing the number of requests sent to the server is critical for the web page\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

You can also prevent the crawling of unimportant pages on the website.<\/p>\n

You can use the robots.txt file to prevent web pages from being indexed on Google or similar search engines. But this is not entirely successful. If there is another page that links to the current page, it could still get indexed.<\/p>\n

If you want to remove a page from being indexed once and for all, add the <\/span>noindex<\/strong> <\/span>robots meta tag to the page\u2019s HTML code.<\/p>\n

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Follow and nofollow links<\/strong><\/p>\n

A crawler usually crawls the linked pages inside a page it\u2019s already visiting.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, you might want to prevent a linked web page from being associated with your site or not crawl it from the current page. In such cases, you can pass <\/span>nofollow<\/strong> <\/span>as the value of the <\/span>rel<\/strong> <\/span>attribute.<\/p>\n

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However, <\/span>Google announced<\/a> <\/span>that they are using <\/span>nofollow<\/strong> <\/span>as only a hint, not a rule, since 2020. So, using <\/span>nofollow<\/strong> <\/span>would only hint Google that you don\u2019t want the linked page crawled; Google may or may not decide to do as you wish.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t want a crawler to follow any of your links, you can instruct them using a single line on your meta robots tag.<\/p>\n

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Structured data<\/h2>\n

You may have seen how, sometimes, the search result page display results in special formats. For example, if you google \u201cpasta recipes\u201d, the result page displays special cards with links to different recipe pages.<\/p>\n

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<\/i><\/a>Example of search result cards on Google<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Google, and most other search engines, use structured data provided in a web page to retrieve data to display special features like this one.<\/p>\n

The vocabulary used for writing structured data is mostly similar to the one defined in <\/span>schema.org<\/a> <\/span>. However, you should refer to the search engine\u2019s documentation to see the exact format accepted by it. If you are optimizing for Google, you can test and validate your structured data using <\/span>Google\u2019s Rich Results Test<\/a> <\/span>.<\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s see how we can use structured data on our web page to provide the right information to Google about its content.<\/p>\n

If our web page is a recipe page, you can use the following structured data, written in JSON-LD format, to provide name, author, ratings, and other relevant data about the recipe.<\/p>\n

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In addition to Recipe, Google provides a handful of other feature types, including Article, FAQ, Book, JobPosting, and Local Business. Refer to <\/span>Google\u2019s developer documentation<\/a> <\/span>to find out more details about different structured data formats and content types.<\/p>\n

Page load speed<\/h2>\n

Page load speed is one of the main aspects of providing a better user experience to the users.<\/p>\n

A 2018 survey conducted by Google discovered that the probability of bounce increases by 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s and increases by 90% when the page load time goes from 1s to 5s.<\/p>\n

Due to the importance of page speed for user experience, Google started using it as a ranking factor in its ranking algorithm. Now, increased page load speed is a cause for your web page to rank higher on Google\u2019s results page.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s essential to make your web page load fast, it\u2019s also essential to make it feel like loading fast to the users. You have to reduce the time it takes to display some content on the page to hold the user\u2019s attention while the rest of the content loads in the background and makes it feel like your page loads faster to the user.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s Lighthouse<\/a> <\/span>is a great tool to measure your site\u2019s performance. Its performance score is not based only on the actual page speed under perfect network conditions. It factors how your site performs over even crappy 3G connections. Lighthouse is a great tool to measure how your page load time would feel to an actual user.<\/p>\n

You can use several approaches to increase the load speed of a web page.<\/p>\n