How Website Development Actually Affects SEO Rankings (1 Minute Read)

Logan McClure | 7/21/2022

Front-End Development

Quality website front-end development is key to a company or brand’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google rankings. A good user experience helps SEO tremendously and is among the most important parts of front-end development. This can help reduce your bounce rate and increase the average visit time. This leads to better, more efficient engagement and higher trust for your company. Make sure that the front-end matches your brand and overall message. It is also key that this is easy to use, loads quickly, and has good quality content that provides value.

Desktop vs Mobile Optimization

The majority of traffic for most industries will come from mobile devices. Google now uses what is called a “mobile-first” index. They look at the mobile version of your site first when determining your ranking. Bing and Yahoo have similar policies and technology that prioritizes sites with good mobile features. Make sure that all content is available and optimized in mobile, tablet and web so that anyone can access your site from any device and have the same enjoyable experience.

Backend Development and Heading Structure

What is “backend development?” Essentially, it is the code that runs behind the scenes of your website. This includes server, database, application code, etc. Optimizing your backend structure is crucial for good SEO. Heading structure specifically is important for users and search crawlers. The title tag is the most important heading. This should be 50-60 characters long, include a target keyword, and representative of the content on the page. The meta description is a short paragraph of text under title tag in the SERPs. This should ideally be 135-155 characters long, also with a target keyword and good content. H tags (H1, h2, etc.) are HTML headings that are used to mark up a web page or title and help overall SEO as well. 

 

SEO Quick Tips

  • Use CSS the right way to make your content easy to consume.
  • Avoid placing any text before your H1 headers on any page.
  • Frequently separate content with headers (H tags) to help search engines understand your content.
  • Use correct HTML markup to structure the content on your site.
  • Don’t use full-column layouts.
  • Don’t use too much Javascript and condense content when necessary.
  • Prioritize speeding up loading times as this will directly or indirectly affect your SEO rankings.