SEO best practices for developers.

In the previous articles,we have looked at some of the less technical ways to optimize your website. Here, we will look at some more technical ways that you can use on your web pages for maximum optimization.

Some of the advanced SEO techniques include ;

1. Using XML Sitemaps.

XML sitemaps is simply a file that tells search engines what pages are essential and supposed to be displayed.XML sitemaps make sure the search engines don’t display half the information ,and that they crawl through and display the relevant pages.

Below is a simple XML sitemap instance;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">  
<url>  
<loc>https://www.yoast.com/wordpress-seo/</loc>  
<lastmod>2022-01-01</lastmod>  
</url>  
</urlset>

The XML snippet is divided into a couple of parts;

• The XML tag declares the version and type of file the search engines crawlers will be reading and displaying.

• The URL Set tag declares the protocol to the search engines.

• The URL tag lists the URL of all the relevant pages to the search engine crawlers.

• The Lastmod tag contains date information that is used to tell the search engine crawlers when the page was last modified.

2. Using HTML sitemaps.

An HTML sitemap refers to an HTML page where all the other HTML pages and subpages are listed, and it’s mostly found linked on the footer.

In the above page, the footer contains a list of the pages found in the entire web page. Since footers are visible to everyone, so are the HTML sitemaps.

3. Making your web page mobile friendly.

When it comes to displaying search results, most search engines prioritize and show the ones that are more mobile friendly first. So in short, making your web page responsive is a technique of search engine optimization its own.

4. Using Canonical links.

Sometimes you want to post the same content on different sites, for either more exposure or any other reason. But will search engines crawl through each and every one of them and display them all? Well in most cases, search engines treat this as duplicate content and not display it, which in turn hurts your sites’ relevance. Using canonical links, you can give your most relevant site the chance to be identified by search engines and displayed. One of the ways in which you can implement a canonical tag to your page is by adding it straight to your HTML head tag.

For an instance, you can have the following in the HTML head tag of the site that you want displayed by search engines

Using these SEO techniques and practices combined with the one we looked at at the previous articles, you will have increased the relevance of your page and given it a higher chance to be easily identified by search engine crawlers.

Good luck !