In this digital world, everyone has realized the importance of SEO in the field of marketing. As a marketer, even if you are not a web developer or SEO expert, you might eventually find yourself stuck somewhere between the two. This is because Web Source Code optimization works the best when you want to nip the SEO problems in the bud and improve the website traffic. However, it’s not a piece of cake to crack open a website code and make your SEO campaign successful in one go. But don’t worry because in this blog post we’re going to talk about ‘how you can make your web source code SEO friendly’ from scratch.

Know Your Souce Code

Before we begin with the different elements of source code and their optimization techniques, let’s know how to open source code (We promised to begin from scratch for you!). For this, open the web page and simply press “Ctrl+U”. Now what you are seeing on the screen is “Web Source Code”. This is what a web crawler gets to see when they overview a website. According to many web developers and SEO experts, it’s beneficial if you start SEO-friendly coding right from the beginning.

Now that you have opened the source code, below are the different elements you’ll find on the screen. Read on to know how you can turn them to your benefit.

1. Title tag: One of the most important elements, you can easily find it in the source code bounded by title tags both sides. This is what Google reflects in the search engine results. The title tag should be optimized well with catchy keywords. Make sure it’s not all about keywords and rather sensible so that the viewers click.

2. Meta description: It is a small summary of 150 characters used to describe the web page. It can include the key benefits or features of your product on the web page with limited keywords so that the searchers are impressed enough to click on it. It helps in advertising and thus, you can make the most of it by using different descriptors for every page.

3. H1 heading tag: H1 heading tag is the main heading of your webpage. It is that pillar of your website content that attracts the attention of visitors to the rest of the content. The H1 heading is crucial as it’s the first impression and thus should be warm & inviting. Do not overstuff it with keywords and rather make it look natural. There should be only one H1 tag per page, followed by H2, H3… so on if needed.

4. Internal links and anchor texts: It increases the value of your webpage with the help of extra information. Source code helps you to check the particular link and the text which is anchored, so you can avoid errors. Both the internal link & the anchor text should be meaningful since search engines pay attention to it while deciding what web pages to serve to their users.

5. Nofollow links: These links are more complicated as they are present in the anchor text which is in the form of “JavaScripts”. You can find these links in the source code tagged “nofollow” to tell bots not to follow the link. These tags make it easy for you to check the type of backlinks you are getting which is important for off-page SEO.

6. Image alt tags: These tags represent your website images and help explain robots what your site image is featuring. Image alt tags simply enhance the quality of your website content in the eye of search engine bots.

7. Canonical tag: Various pages of the same website may have similar content because of the same purpose. In that case, colonial tags can save your pages from the mark of copied content. It helps Google to choose the preferable page of your website.

While the aforementioned were a few things that must be taken care of for Search Engine Optimization via web source code, it would be even better if we could look into SEO from the very beginning of website development. Below are a few tips to start SEO in the course of the development process.

1. Code of indexing: eCommerce sites with numerous web pages, often exceed the crawling budget; indexing all these pages by Google would be time taking. Using web source code elements like Robot.txt and no-index meta tag you can block those files, with which you don’t want to crawl.
2. Handle the links of the web: Links (both internal and external) are a crucial part of web pages. They are vital from the SEO perspective as they provide richness to content. You can manage both the follow/no-follow links and broken/dead links. It will help bots to jump into the right information.
3. Manage the site map: It’s important to keep your site maps, both HTML and XML, fresh and updated. Ultimately these maps guide bots to crawl your site pages properly.
4. Improve the crawl budget: You can make it possible for google to rank quality pages only by indexing the maximum number of pages. Check out the ways to do so:
   – Remove the duplicate pages
   – Use disallow rules of Robots.txt file
   – Fix broken links
   – Keep both of the site maps up-to-date
5. Manage the metadata: Meta title, Meta description, Meta tags are all a part of the metadata. These are important for search engines to prepare snippets (the extra details of website data on the ranking page). These snippets increase your chances of being chosen from other SERPs results.
6. Oversee duplicate content issue: You can oversee the duplicate content issue through the “rel=canonical” tag, which is present in the site code section of heading.
7. Optimize code: Code optimization can be taken care of during programming by writing compact, clear & comprehensive code and using the best practices only. This allows crawlers to perform the task quickly & results in quality indexing.

While developing a website, we often forgo SEO and expect to leave it for the future. It is when the website development is completed, the SEO team is allowed in which leads to a topsy-turvy in the coding due to the required changes. We all have realized the importance of SEO Services which if performed timely can drive great success and save time & money.

Hire our SEO Experts

We at Tech9logy Creators believe in the power of SEO. We have a team of SEO experts who are well-equipped with all the tips & tricks and have already helped multiple businesses grow. You can feel free to talk to our SEO consultants who are there to assist you and will walk you through the different means by which they can help your business maximize ROI.