When it comes to SEO, many people automatically think of keywords. But did you know that content is not the only important part of optimizing your website for search engines? How your website is programmed is a crucial part of creating a successful SEO strategy.
The content side of SEO is created after the website has been coded by adding Meta tags and keyword-rich copy to help search engines identify the website and show it in search results. The actual code structure of the website is what helps to ensure that search engines can efficiently decipher the information.
5 Key Components of SEO Programming
1. Information
A clean, hierarchical code is the most important part of how the programming of a website can positively affect SEO results. Search engines do not have real people reading website content and ranking them. Instead, they have “robots”, which are programs that have been written to search for certain HTML elements. The cleaner the code, the easier it is for these “robots” to decipher the content and rank the website accordingly.
2. Meta Tags
Page titles and page descriptions are two of the key elements of a web page that help search engines understand the content of each page. These Meta tags are what display in results of a search engine. Making sure these are coded properly is crucial to guarantee that the data gets through to the search engine and presents properly on results pages.
3. HTML Elements
HTML elements help search engine “robots” decipher the content of pages. Using the correct heading elements (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to signify main section titles versus sub section titles will help the “robots” understand which pieces are most important. A good, clean code only has one H1 tag per web page and multiple sub headings to clearly identify the hierarchy of content.
4. Images
Images are another HTML element that can have a drastic effect on SEO. Ensuring that each image has an Alt tag is extremely important. This allows search engines to understand the importance of an image on the page and display the image, even if a browser has trouble loading.
5. Speeds
The speed that a web page loads is another factor in search engine ranking. Slow web pages will rank lower, so it is important that the developer optimizes each page for speed. Techniques like compressing images and server use can be critical parts of your website’s overall speed and SEO.
All in all, there is a lot more to SEO than just filling your content with key terms to boost search engine ranking. Good, clean code can not only help guarantee that your website is understood efficiently by search engines, but it can improve results with these other key factors.
Does your website need an SEO boost? Contact us to have your website rebuilt or scraped for SEO optimization. When you see the results, you’ll be happy that you did!