SEO Guidelines for Developers: How to make your webiste Search Engine Friendly

Understand that, It is the DEVELOPER'S JOB to incorporate the BASIC guidelines of Search Engine Friendliness in their project.

If you are not aware of those "BASIC GUIDELINES", this blogpost is for you. 

SEO CHECK LIST FOR DEVELOPERS




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Meta-Tags and Page Titles
Make sure that your meta-tags are arranged correctly - your page title tags and description tags should describe the content of your different web pages. The page title tags should be less then 68 characters and the description tags more detailed but less then 148 characters.
Each Page should be titled as <page title> | <website name>. For Example title for "About Us" page of "Wow Deals" would be About Us | Wow Deals

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Header Tags
Make sure you label the different headers on your web pages using H tags.


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URL's
Make sure that your web page URLs are SEO friendly, use mod re-write for Linux and Apache hosting or use IIS redirect for Windows. Ideally make it so that the URLs describe your content i.e. use domain.com/blue-widgets.php as apposed to having something like domain.com/product.php?cat=146. Use hyphens or underscores to separate words in the URLs.

Make sure that you use descriptive URLs for your images i.e. use blue-widget.jpg as apposed a bunch of numbers and or letters .jpg.
Folder names must not appear in URL's. For CMS Developers - you must not use names like "cms_pages\cms" in URL's. URL should be meaningful.

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Alt Tags
Make sure that you label all of your images with descriptive alt attributes.


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301 Redirects
Make sure that there is only one version of your site - 301 redirect all non www. URLs to the www. ones or vice versa.

Make sure that there is only one version of your homepage - 301 redirect the index or default page back to domain.com.


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404 Page
Make sure that the site has a 404 Page, to handle situations where the user might enter a wrong URL


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RSS Feeds
Website should have RSS Feeds. Feeds must be validated using W3C Feed Validator Tool.
Tool Link: http://validator.w3.org/appc/

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HTML Validation
 Check the validity of your HTML code using W3C Markup Validator
Tool Link: http://validator.w3.org/

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CSS Validation
Don't use nested tables to lay out the site. Instead use CSS. Make sure the CSS is valid. Check the validity using the given tool link.
Tool Link: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

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Check Mobile Friendliness
Check the mobile version of site using Mobile Checker Tool
Tool Link: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

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Broken Link Checking
Make sure that the website does not have any broken links
Broken Link Checker Tools are available online for free.

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Sitemaps
Make sure the website has a sitemap.xml file. It must be present in the root directory
Generate sitemaps using this tool: www.xml-sitemaps.com

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JavaScript
Do not place valuable content/links within JavaScript. If you feel there is an un-avoidable need to use JavaScript menus, don't put the code for them into the head of the page. Instead, put the JavaScript in an external file (such as "myscript.js") and call the JavaScript from the external file.


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Flash Files
Make less use of Flash


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Breadcrumbs
Provide Breadcrumbs (Breadcrumbs are usually found above the main content area of the page with info such as “you are here > home > seo > seo services.”)


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Website Performance
Various Performance measuring tools are available online. You must use them to optimize site performance. Features like gzip compression, custom headers, mod expires, caching, CDN’s can easily be integrated in CMS to improve performance which in turn improves SEO advantage. Most CMS developers never add these features in there CMS because they think that it is not very important.

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DocType
Declare a "doctype" at the very top of each page you write, such as:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>


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Content Type and Charsets
Declare a character-set type in the <head> of every page, like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> or this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

And then STICK WITH THAT CHARACTER SET--don't use characters that aren't in the character set you select. You can blow off one of the search engine robots by putting characters in your page that it is not expecting.


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Page-Linking
If a webpage doesn’t have text, do not link it with the wrong page.
Example: If there are no Blogs on the Blog Page, most developers would prefer linking it to the News Page where the text is present. You should not do this. Instead, use a Page with text saying "Our Blog Page is Under Construction"


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