10 SEO Tips For Website Developers

If you're a website developer, or looking to add more functionality to your company website, then you might already know about SEO, and why it's important. If you don't know much about SEO, then here's what you need to know so that you can attract new visitors to your site.

1. Ensure that you give each URL a meaningful name - products.php?id=1234&cat=blue is not memorable and won't help visitors remember what your products are. In addition, when visitors look through their history, or the URL drops down in the address bar, they won't know what they have looked at. This is also a good opportunity to make the most of your keywords.

2. It's important to make sure that each page has a unique page tile and meta description. If you're using a Content Management System (CMS), then you'll want to ensure that there isn't the same default page title and description for each page.

3. You'll want to create a sitemap so that visitors can quickly find what they are looking for. In addition, the search engines like sitemaps because they list all the pages of a website. Make sure that you create and XML sitemap that can be submitted to the search engines too.

4. If you don't want certain areas of your website to be indexed by the search engines, then you'll need to create a robots.txt file. This file allows you to block access to files or folders. You might not want your customer details to be indexed for example. You'll need to exercise caution when using robots.txt as you might inadvertently stop the whole site from being indexed!

5. Why not create a customised 404 page so that if a visitor finds a dead link, or mistypes something, they can still find what they are looking for. Again, this is a good way to promote your keywords and push certain areas of your website, or products.

6. No matter how competent you are at programming, and no matter how complicated your database queries are, or how secure your login process is, you need to be careful not to make things too complicated for users. Not everybody has the same amount of technical knowledge, or internet experience that you have, and might be put off by the functionality of your website.

7. If you have a search facility, such as on most ecommerce sites, then you'll need to make sure that the search results are relevant, and likely to be what people searching the site would be looking for. This is especially relevant if the products are spelt phonetically, or are hard to spell. You might also want to limit the search results to the product pages, so that any reference to the search query in the privacy policy or terms and conditions is not included. You'll want visitors to buy items, rather than be guided to the "lesser" pages

8. Again, you'll want to make the site easy to use. This includes all aspects of the site, from the registration and login process to the search results and checkout process. If the site is hard to use, visitors won't want to buy from you, no matter how good the prices are.

9. If you use a CMS, make sure that the users can actually use it. There's no point in having a site that the client can update themselves, if they have to ring you up each time they want to add a page, or change product prices.

10. Try and use includes to keep the code clean and quick to load. Having a faster load time is beneficial to both users and search engines alike, and will ensure that visitors can see your content without getting bored waiting for pages to load.

Now you know more about how to make your websites better for visitors and search engines, perhaps now is the time to see what other SEO tips you can use.

SEO Sheffield is part of the UK SEO Network. Please also visit our sister sites SEO Manchester and SEO Birmingham [l]