Intro
Search engine optimization (SEO) has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation in recent years. We’ve all seen confusing examples of ungrammatical text stuffed with irrelevant keywords. When done mechanically or without much thought, the results of bad SEO can be stilted and unnatural, more obviously written for a web crawler than for a reader. But that doesn’t have to be the case! When done thoughtfully, SEO can enhance web copy and make it both more useful and more relevant to your target audience.
The key to deploying SEO in a way that will benefit both you and your audience is to use your programming skills to optimize your web text subtly in ways that search engines will love and your readers either won’t notice or will think of as beneficial rather than detrimental. If you have some basic programming know-how, there are ten proven strategies to use programming skills for instant SEO results. Otherwise, you can get instant coding homework help from top-tier experts who gladly offer the following tips you should follow immediately.
1. Optimize website speed
One of the factors search engines consider when evaluating a website is how fast it loads. Page load speed can give you a critical edge when there are a large number of very similar competing sites. Your programming skills can help you to optimize your code to make your web pages load faster. Some of the best ways to enhance load speed are minifying CSS and JavaScript, leveraging browser caching, and reducing server response time. By making these backend changes, you can get your pages to load faster and push your site up in the search engine rankings.
2. Making your site mobile-friendly
In today’s competitive search engine marketplace, the majority of your users are likely to be searching on their phones, not on a desktop or laptop device. That’s why you need to implement responsible web design to ensure your site works just as well on mobile devices as it does on traditional laptops or desktops. Knowledge of programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are essential for creating sites that display properly across all devices. Search engines like Google consider these factors when ranking sites, so to optimize your rank, you’ll need to make sure your site displays on Android and iOS, not just Windows.
3. Implement structured data markup
It’s very important that search engines be able to understand your website’s content. Search engines’ web crawlers need to be able to take rich snippets from your site (such as product star ratings, event times, contact information, etc.) and present those excerpts in their results in order to improve click-through rates. The best way to make your content comprehensible to web crawlers is to write and implement structured data (via JSON-LD or microdata) using programming languages. The easier you make it for search engines to pull data, the more visitors they will send to your site. It can also help to check what your competitors are doing with a tool like Backlink Checker so you can also do what works.
4. Canonicalize tags and URLs
Search engines can punish you for creating sites with duplicate content. You can use canonical tags to help avoid any duplicate content issues by specifying which of many duplicate or similar pages is the master copy, allowing a search engine to prioritize which page to recommend. You can use programming skills to insert redirects and canonical annotations to send search engines and users to the master page. Similarly, programming skills can help you to create clean, user-friendly URLs that are stocked with relevant keywords that search engines can index.
5. Implement SSL/HTTPs
The online world can be a dangerous place, and web users are rightly concerned about their privacy and the security of their data. After all, hardly a month goes by that we don’t hear about a major security breach or privacy violation. Search engines understand that concern and prioritize sites that are secure. In fact, many use security measures as a ranking factor. To enhance your SEO, you need to use your programming skills to configure SSL certificates and ensure that HTTPS is implemented properly throughout your site, both to help your users feel safe and to enhance your SEO and achieve higher search engine rankings. The more secure your site is, the more search engines and end users will trust that your site is valuable and safe.
6. Optimize media and images
Media and images can make sites more engaging for readers, but they also can drag down page load times. Every online user has had the experience of a media-heavy website taking forever to load, or waiting and waiting as one image or video stops the whole page from loading. As we know, the speed your site loads is an important factor of SEO. That’s where programming skills can come into play. You can use your skills to write scripts that can automate the image optimization process. By automatically resizing images, compressing images, or adding alt text as needed, you can improve your load time, make your pages more accessible, and improve your SEO and thus your page rankings.
7. Fix crawl errors
Search engines want to know that the websites they index work correctly, and so do users. After all, no one wants to hunt through a website for a piece of information or a product listing only to find out that the page no longer exists or has a critical error. If your site is full of crawl errors, such as 404 pages, or are loaded with broken links, your site won’t be rated highly on search engines. Programming skills come in handy to fix these kinds of issues. You can use your skills to analyze server logs, identify crawl errors, and either redirect or fix any broken links. Once you do, you’ll have a smoother crawl experience for search engine bots and also make it more likely that your well-indexed site will rank more highly.
8. Customize your site’s robots.txt and XML sitemaps
There is no reason to cede all of the power over your site’s indexing to search engine bots. If you have programming skills, you can take precise control over what material search engines can crawl and index. By using your programming knowledge, you can customize and configure the robots.txt and XML sitemaps for your sites in order to prioritize the content you want search engines to find and display. The robots.txt file is typically located in your site’s root directory and specifies rules for either all bots or specific bots, directing them to URLs that they are either allowed or not allowed to crawl. However, it is important to remember that robots.txt is not a security feature and relies on reputable search engines voluntarily respecting the rules you set.
9. Improve your site’s navigation and internal linking
There are many good reasons to make your site easier to navigate. First and foremost, it will help your users get around more easily and efficiently, which enhances the user experience and makes them see your site in a more favorable light. But creating dynamic menus and optimizing internal linking structures also has another benefit. These webs of connections showing how pages relate to one another make it easier for search engines to crawl through your site and understand its structure quickly and efficiently. That, in turn, delivers better search results and can boost your site’s rankings.
10. Conduct A/B testing and SEO experiments
Not all SEO solutions come prepacked off the shelf. Sometimes, a little experimentation is in order to find out what works best for your specific site. Programming skills can help you to implement A/B tests and experimental SEO strategies to evaluate how changes to specific aspects of your site, such as headings, meta tags, multimedia, keywords, etc.) can impact SEO performance. A/B testing presets two different options and allows for a comparison and contrast between each option. A SERP Simulator tool can help with this process. SEO experiments can take many forms and are often developed by site owners in response to specific issues or concerns they have registered with their unique site’s individual performance. Programming skills allow you to make these changes programmatically in order to gauge the impact of each change on SEO results with a tool like Rank Tracker.
While this is not a conclusive list of SEO enhancement strategies, these ten tips will allow site owners or managers with programming skills to start making improvements that will help their sites to rank higher in search engine results and, we hope, drive more traffic from search engines to those sites. If you aren’t already using these strategies, putting a few into practice will likely make a significant impact.
Remember: Ultimately, the goal of SEO isn’t to make the robots happy but to get your site ranked so real, live humans will visit and engage with it. At the end of the day, your site needs to focus on the user experience more than bot-pleasing strategies. All the SEO in the world won’t help if the end user visits your site only to encounter an off-putting, confusing set of pages designed to be read by machines instead of people. The best SEO strategy remains foregrounding the user to ensure that the user gets the best possible experience whenever they visit your site.
