A new web project is a new application in its own right. Technicians, integrators and developers must be involved from the first sketches of the need. It is about the performance of your SEO and your position on Google.
Each SEO project is unique, because each company is unique. The company carrying out a project has its own constraints:
- activity area,
- competition,
- marketing position,
- business goals,
- available resources…
and therefore, has a specific SEO. One of the common denominators to this great diversity of projects is the need to integrate the technical implementations and recommendations identified by the consultant or the Professional SEO agency in charge of the project. The technician in charge implements these improvements directly via the CMS or the “ready to use” web solution if they allow them. If this is not the case, specific web development is required. Whatever the situation: any SEO specialist must be able to count on the expertise of a web development agency to achieve their goals and get the full potential of a site!
WHY IS SEO DEPENDENT ON TECHNOLOGY (INTEGRATION, WEB DEVELOPMENT, ETC.)?
You have released a budget for the SEO of your website. After a long study of your case, the SEO specialist gives you dozens and dozens of modifications and technical implementations to make to improve your visibility! But, in the end: who should be responsible for making the technical improvements? Without a developer or a web integrator or a web agency by your side, your SEO project will quickly become a failure… or will not achieve the objectives set. This mess is often subject to tension, delay or loss of trust between the SEO agency, the client and the entity in charge of developing the website.
It would be adventurous (or even completely irresponsible) to entrust your site to your SEO consultant without being interested in the technical side of things. It is essential for integrators, web developers and SEO agencies to work together to develop a technically sound site, to obtain a better positioning on Google. Ask for guarantees from your SEO expert and/or your web service provider before starting your project!
WHEN DO SEO AND WEB DEVELOPMENT WORK TOGETHER?
Each technical error present on a site penalizes its referencing on search engines. Many errors can be avoided by coordinating the actions of the web developer/integrator and the SEO expert. For the organic traffic of your website to be important, it is necessary to ensure that the web development manager and the SEO manager can work together. Concretely, what does effective cooperation between SEO and web development look like? When do they come to work together?
WHEN CREATING A WEBSITE
Ideally, the process of creating a website or an online store integrates one or more organic SEO specialists from the start. Through this, they offer SEO guidelines to developers regarding the technical elements of the page or the content that should be on it. Their work is necessary in the design and implementation stages of the website – they check whether all the elements have been prepared according to the best development practices and will not negatively affect the positioning of the site on Google and other search engines. Best practices include Hen markup (titles), URLs, metadata optimization, site speed, image alternative tags, and more.
DURING A WEBSITE REDESIGN
A website redesign is not just a graphic redesign. It is also an opportunity to rework its digital acquisition strategy as a whole and especially its natural referencing. Forgetting to integrate an SEO audit and good technical practices inevitably leads to a loss of positions and natural traffic. By communicating regularly with each other, the web developer and the SEO expert make sure to move forward at the same speed and to have the same level of information. The web developer or integrator verifies that the SEO recommendations are applicable and the SEO validates the changes made to the site so that they are not harmful to its good positioning.
You will thus obtain the certainty that the project is progressing well, that it covers its entire functional scope, that it will meet all the expectations dictated in the specifications and above all that the new site is perfectly well gauged by Google and appreciated. Internet users!
THROUGHOUT THE LIFECYCLE OF YOUR SITE
If the creation and redesign of the site necessarily require the intervention and cooperation of a web developer and an SEO expert, the website of your structure needs regular monitoring and the long-term skills of these two professionals. Search engines are developing and modifying their algorithms every day to meet the expectations of Internet users. Google therefore likes sites that live and evolve by regularly adding pages and content (essential!), integrating new features or simply changing the design of certain pages.
Each change can create errors or blocking factors for the SEO of your site. The best way to guard against this is to carry out a regular comprehensive SEO audit. The SEO specialist then identifies the perfectible elements and the brakes to improve the positioning of the company in the organic search results. This list of technical recommendations would be useless without the expertise of the web developer or the integrator who implements the technical optimizations. It is also important that there is a dialogue between the developer and the SEO during each intervention on the website. The Goal is that the SEO and development objectives come together and do not block each other.
HOW WEB DEVELOPMENT INFLUENCES SEO?
Each web referencing project must integrate a technical SEO audit from its conception. This study focuses on specific elements related to the analyzed site but also on a list of essential elements which can be factors blocking a good web referencing if they are not taken into account.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of priority points to check for SEO:
WEBSITE MENU
An essential navigation element, the site menu is often chosen in connection with business objectives, website design and SEO. SEO also depends on web development. However, web development remains crucial at this stage: the menu must be developed in such a way as to be perfectly visible and understandable by search engines. A very large menu with hundreds of links can become an obstacle to good page loading speed (Page Speed). A menu that is not optimized sends a very negative signal to Google, where Page Speed is becoming more and more predominant.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
In 2021, it is inconceivable not to have a mobile-friendly website (tablets, smartphones, etc.). It is the role of the web developer or web designer to make the site perfectly accessible and pleasant from these terminals. What is the relationship with SEO? Google has implemented “Mobile First Indexing”, a new way of browsing sites with indexing robots. Googlebot now crawls the mobile version of a page first, rather than the desktop version, to assess the relevance of each site. There is a google filter that favors mobile friendly sites. A non-mobile site will not be referenced or poorly.
STRUCTURED DATA
Embedding structured data on a website has a big impact on SEO. This is the information automatically selected by Google in the source code of your site to appear in an orderly fashion in the search results, under the name of the listed sites. It is very likely that an SEO expert will recommend their implementation by checking the accuracy of these. Mistakes often happen. In this case, Google robots are unable to read them correctly and interpret them in the search results (SERP). They are useless! And your site is cut to the SERP!
PAGE LOAD SPEED
A very important element from an SEO for Photographer point of view but sometimes neglected by some developers, the loading speed of a web page is often at the heart of discussions and arbitrations between the web development manager and the SEO manager. Neglecting problems related to fast page loading could, in some cases, have a negative effect on positioning (UX, crawl budget, etc.).
A real SEO specialist will point out problems with page loading, help diagnose and eliminate their causes. These malfunctions may result from the use of external resources or plugins that slow down page loading such as the weight of graphic elements or the existence of unnecessary fragments of HTML and CSS code.
Slow loading will have a negative impact on the positioning and SEO of a website .
PICTURES
The photos on the site may seem insignificant, but they are really important from an SEO point of view. An SEO consultant working with the web development team will ensure that the images used on the site have the optimal size that will not slow down the loading of the page, with the use of Web format in particular.
The SEO consultant will also ensure that the graphics are SEO optimized. This requires the configuration of a good writing of ALT tags and the correct address of the resource – extremely important or even mandatory in e-commerce where organic traffic can be obtained via an image search. The ALT attribute allows you to set the image in case a network problem does not display the image.
HOW TO FACILITATE COOPERATION BETWEEN WEB DEVELOPMENT AND SEO
Cooperation between web development and SEO specialists can be complicated… even incredible. This is all the truer when the two specialists do not belong to the same entity (freelancers, different agencies, etc.), making communication complex. Each of them has their own objectives and wishes to achieve them in accordance with their resources, best practices and working habits. However, dogs and cats can get along! The success of a Web project lies in communication, cooperation and understanding the needs of each stakeholder.
Here are some basic tips to improve the functioning between the web developer and the SEO.
- Step 1 – Know the project: The specifications are a reference document in a site creation, redesign or simply improvement project, both in terms of appearance and structure. This is where an SEO specialist should ask about specific features and technologies that will be used to create an SEO-friendly site.
- Step 2 – List SEO requirements: After analyzing the website design and technologies, the SEO expert prepares guidelines for the developer regarding SEO requirements. It is important that these guidelines contain specific information that developers should pay attention to in order to avoid errors.
- Step 3 – Developer’s comments: The developer, after reading the recommendations, indicates which guidelines are clear to him and what is possible to implement, and on which he has comments to make or questions to clarify.
- Step 4 – SEO specialist comments: The SEO specialist comments on the comments. In practice, steps 3 and 4 can be repeated until the development and SEO specialists agree on the final version.
- Step 5 – verification of implementations: This is a very important element requiring rigor on the part of the SEO specialist and the developer and good communication between them. After each implementation, the developer must contact the SEO specialist so that he can verify and validate it quickly so as not to block the progress of the project.
- Step 6 – acceptance testing and final validation: this is the last step of cooperation between the web developer and the SEO expert before publishing the website. An SEO specialist is supposed to double-check the list of all recommended implementations and confirm to the developer that they have no comments on them.
As you will have understood, web development and web referencing form a strong duo that must agree, exchange and collaborate intelligently in order to obtain a website that meets the requirements of Internet users and search engines, because it has a solid technical structure. Choose an SEO agency that works with a web development agency to be sure that both specialties are involved and create synergies around your project! To ensure the creation, the redesign or simply the day-to-day management of your site and its referencing, SEO agency of the same group and specialized for 15 years in web development!
Read more: What is SEO? : An Explanation For Beginners