SEO Key elements and SEO in general even may not be our primary assignment as web developers, but it is still important to consider, when creating the code behind the webpages.

The following is a list of some of the things, we always should make sure are applied to the web page.

Title, Keywords and Description

Elements like Title, Keywords and Description metatags should be easy to edit. As of 2015, the Title should be no more than 55 characters and ideally no less than 40 characters. The Description no more than 115 characters. The CMS should count the characters for the editors and display the number when editing.

Examples of title, keyword and description metatags:

<title>Example title</title>
<metatag name=”keyword” description=”keyword, another keyword, important keyword too” />
<metatag name=”description” description=”description of the content of the current webpage” />

URL

The URL should be less than 90 characters, although this is not a hard limit. It is far more important to make sure the website has a SEO-friendly URL structure that is meaningful and not dependent on a page URL. For example, www.example.com/topic/page is better than www.example.com/?page=9999 . This often depends on CMS, but is sometimes customizable, for example in WordPress.

Header tags

Even if the opinions differ on this, make sure that the header tags are optimized for SEO. One H1 tag only per page. This means better web accessibility as well). In addition, Bing prefers one H1 tag only. Of course, you can allow any number of H2 and H3 tags.

The next SEO for developers blog entry deals with Social Media tags