When we are talking about SEO we think of Google Ranking and searches. This is essential to make a name for your website and brand. If SEO is messed up, then the whole site can drop out to Google instantly.

Just a simple mistake in SEO can throw all the hard work you’ve spent just to build your site reputation on Google searches. So developers and website owner should take into precautions every step in regards to SEO.

Here are some Tips and Guidelines for Successful Optimization:

1.      Thread Carefully on Single Page Application (SPA)

SPA’s are great. Having an infinite scrolling compels site visitors to be more engaged in more contents in one session. But poorly implemented SPA can kill your organic traffic. A website with a lot of side scripting may look great, but it is really problematic for Google and other bots to execute.

It is recommended to build a pre-rendering fallback for search bots, which ensure they can sniff your content despite the impenetrable JavaScript.

2.      Avoid Content Duplication

A badly planned website can lead to duplicate content under multiple URLs, and Google penalized that.

This can be caused by poor category planning. For example, a men’s fashion store having the same content available under ‘/shoes/’ and ‘/men/shoes/.

To avoid this, plan the site schematic early to eliminate conflict areas.

3.      Build SEO into your QA process

These questions must be asked with your site developer before any major changes in SEO occurs. So that new code can be vetted for SEO soundness before they go online.

Here are some things the guidelines can cover:

·        Are you changing the URL structure of the content?

·        Are you changing the way content is rendered?

·        Are you giving any commands specifically for bots or search engines, such as “noindex”?

If the new SEO code falls into these guidelines, then it worth a much more digging to understand how this change will impact the way the site is rendered by search engines.

On the other hand, cosmetic changes affecting the CSS or graphics are much less likely to impact SEO.

In addition, configuring your site with Google Search Console and running Fetch as Google to spot potential issues are good ideas.

4.      Own Technical SEO

While it might be tempting to push the SEO responsibilities to marketers, there’s only so much they can know.

The realm of technical SEO, which refers to SEO work apart from content creation, should be owned by developers because it requires knowledge of programming and the site’s infrastructure.

The implementation of pre-render fallbacks for client side scripts or asynchronous content delivery is something that one can only expect a developer to understand.

5.      Don’t Cheat Google

Programmers and developers sometimes believe they’ve found a loophole to cheat on Google by showing user’s one thing and the search engine another. But Google has the resource, manpower and especially world’s brightest mind to protect their algorithm. It’s highly unlikely that your loophole idea has entirely eluded them.

6.      Experimentation are Good

Since Google’s search algorithm is a carefully-guarded secret, the best way to learn SEO is to simply do lots of tests.

A side project can be useful for this. Use it to throw weird code at Google to see how it reacts. Then implement your findings in your day job. In this project you can try every tricks and stuff that you can never try on your main work project, then use these learning to reverse engineer the algorithm.