SEO is really important for many projects. It can increase the number of people who view your application or even boost conversions! For example, in e-commerce, 38.9 percent of purchases came from search engines such as Google.

Also, search engines can make use of the website’s content to allow the user to buy products straight from the search engine. Here are a couple of tips you can use to make sure that search engine robots will love your website.

1. Make Sure Your App is Mobile-first

Mobile is a major platform on the web these days. According to TechCrunch, 51% of Internet traffic comes from mobile devices. To make sure that your application is mobile-friendly, you should code for mobile first and then progressively enhance the experience for tablets and desktops or a high-DPI display.

2. Make Your Images as Small as Possible

Images are what the web is all about now. The downside of using images is that they take a lot of space and bandwidth if you don’t compress them properly.

According to HTTP Archieve, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images.

You should use tools to compress images to strip all meta tags, convert your images to JPEG (if they aren’t transparent) and lower their quality – the human eye won’t see the difference unless the user focuses on the image and zooms it.

Using media queries on images is also a good practise to use different sizes images based upon screen size.

3. Deliver your content over CDN

A content delivery network is a system that uses distributed servers to deliver websites and other web content depending on user’s location, and website’s content.

Essentially, a way of taking a websites static files, like CSS, images, and JavaScript, and delivering them through web servers that are closer to the user’s physical location. Shorter proximity amounts to faster load time.

3. Make Sure You Have Text on Your Website

Text is the kind of information that computers and, consequently, search engine robots find the easiest to aggregate.

It’s quite easy for such websites as the Guardian or the New York Times, since they offer mostly articles, but it can be different on e-commerce sites, which chiefly consist of photos of products. It’s a good practice to make sure that each product has a unique description.

Another way to improve SEO in e-commerce is to implement a blog in your application, where you will report the updates of your application. The more text there is in your app, the easier it will be to aggregate the content on your website.

4. Make sure you have good page load speed

Quickly loading pages are crucial not only for efficient SEO but also for a good UX. Users don’t like to wait for content to show on a website they are trying to browse, and neither do search engine web crawlers.

To achieve fast pageloads, you can make sure that the server generates responses faster, add pagination or infinite scroll, add responsive images using the imgsrc attribute for the img tag, load images on scroll, reduce CSS and JS script sizes, load stylesheets or scripts in an asynchronous way, and many other things.

You can test the page load speed. Remember to test it on various links in your application to get a more general overview.

5. Make Your App PWA

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is quite a new technology introduced by Google to bring native experience to web applications.

They mostly consist of a JavaScript web worker caching the content from your application and manifest file, which can provide a more native experience without the need for building a separate application.

PWA allows you to cache javascript or css files to reduce bandwidth and improve performance. When a visitor arrives at your site the cached version will be served up unless it has changed since the last cache.

6. Use Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs give web crawlers an idea of how your website is structured. In the picture below, you can see that the Guardian uses breadcrumbs to define what article is about. The most obvious use case in e-commerce is to show the category of the product to which a given link leads.

7. Translate Your Routes

Web search engines like to have different paths for content in different languages. If your application is served in many different languages it’s good to translate the paths leading to them, for example:

//www.my-website.co/products/t-shirts/fox-cool-designer - English version

//www.my-webstie.pl/produkty/t-shirts/lis-fajny-projektant – Polish version

Additionally, adding hreflang tags to your site will inform web crawlers of the language of a given link.

8. Make a Sitemap of Your Application

This is pretty simple. A sitemap is an XML file that consists of the URLs that are in your application. This makes a lot easier for search bots to crawl your website. You can also adjust the weight of each link or the frequency at which it should be checked by search engines.

9. Make Sure Your Content is Accessible

There are a few important things such as adding alt attributes to images or a table of contents for bigger pages. Another cool thing you can do is to add transcriptions for your audio and video files. Again, more text means that it will be easier for search engine bots to index your website.

With these nine simple tips, you can make your website search engine-friendly and as a result substantially improve its accessibility, performance and conversion rate.

10. Reduce the number of HTTP requests

Each time someone visits a webpage, the web browsers tries to fetch some pages from the hosts. These files contain any text, images, and multimedia that exist on that webpage.

The more HTTP requests, the longer your site takes to load. And larger files will take even longer to transfer.

• Check how many HTTP requests your site currently makes
• Remove unnecessary images
• Reduce the file size for remaining images
• Evaluate other parts of your page that are contributing to page load time
• Combine CSS files together

11. Load JavaScript asynchronously

Websites today are increasingly integrated with third party content: social media, chat features, commenting services, information feeds, and others.

So if you load async then in the event the third-party crashes, your page won’t be held up trying to load that resource. Async loading can also speed up page loads.

12. Review your hosting service plan

If you’ve gone through the checklist above and still find that web performance is impacted, check with your hosting provider to see whether you have shared or dedicated hosting.

It is possible you might have exceeded the limits of your hosting plan, which may impact your website speed. If this is the case, then it may be time to consider a dedicated plan where you have sole access to the server.

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