4 Development Decisions That Affect SEO

Responsivity

Responsive web design is a technique and design style that allows your website to adapt to any size screen, ensuring that content is rendered in such a way that it is easy to read and navigate.

If your website is not responsive, your SEO is being drastically affected, and not in a good way. Today, search engines like Google take factors like mobile friendliness to be very important when it comes to ranking.

When ranking sites, search engines attempt to factor in the user experience of a website, and there is really no worse user experience than an unresponsive website.

HTML Meta Tags

HTML meta tags are essentially data tags that lie in between the opening and closing head tags of the code. In essence, the meta tag is a snippet of text that describes what that page is all about. This text does not appear anywhere on the page, only in the code on the backend of the website.

Meta tags are usually not difficult to implement yourself—you don’t need a software engineer, but you may need to know some basic HTML knowledge. It doesn’t take a ton of time, but can boost your SEO game and help users find your website.

PNG vs. SVG

SVGs are searchable, crawlable, and indexable, unlike PNGs. This means that when it comes to uploading an image, an SVG is the way to go because it is SEO friendly, and can help users find your website.

If you are wondering why an SVG is searchable, but not a PNG, it is because it is built with XML code, which is text-based itself. SVG’s also make a page load faster, which Google (and other search engines) also take into consideration while ranking websites.

Website Hosting

Google uses page speed to rank websites, and hosting plays a large role in page speed. What this means is that you must be a little cautious when choosing a company to host your website.

Not all hosting is equal, extremely inexpensive hosting services could mean that you will end up with an extremely slow loading website. Also, simply upgrading your web host to a VPN (virtual private network) from a shared server will also reduce your page speed.

For example, if you manage a WordPress website, there are thousands of options for hosting, however, one of your better options is WordPress VIP hosting. Yes, it may be more expensive but you will be sure to have a speedy site.