Boosting your Website’s traffic: Top tech SEO tips

HTTPS

As a first simple step, let’s make sure the website is using HTTPS. HTTPS has a lightweight ranking factor, also it preserves referral data and helps Google analytics

Why? If the site is referred from a social network or another website, HTTP will not tell Google Analytics where the site is referred from, instead, it will send wrong information that the link is referred from Google search or an other search engine, thus providing flawed analytics. On top of that, HTTPS provides security and privacy.

Title

The title should be distinct, descriptive and appear on every page of the application.

Title shows in search results

Why? The search engine users look for page's title to determine whether a page is relevant to their search and also the title is the first text that an assistive technology (screen readers) announces. So, the title has to be unique and must be present for every page.

Meta Description

Meta Description is an HTML attribute that must include the precise summary of the web page. Most of the search engines often display the meta description on search results, so a meta description makes your page more relevant and can increase your site traffic.

Quick Tip: It is recommended to keep the meta description between 50–160 characters.

Meta description shows in search results

Create sitemap.xml

Sitemap lists the pages in the website. This tells the search engine (Google) the important pages in the website, when the page was last updated and the frequency of content change in the page.

Why? If the site is new or large or with pages not linked well (there are chances the bot can overlook and not crawl some pages), sitemap will benefit from having every page in the website discovered by the search engine.

Create robots.txt

Search engine bots crawl websites to discover content. Before visiting pages, they check robots.txt for instructions on which pages can or cannot be served in search results, improving crawling speed and budget.

Create a robots.txt in the root of your application with these four parts:

• Disallow: Specifies which pages must not be crawled by search engine bots
• Allow: Specifies which pages must be crawled to appear in search results
• User-agent: Specifies which bot the directives apply to (e.g., Googlebot, Googlebot-Image)
• Sitemap: Link your sitemap.xml location

Hash(#) and Hashbang(#!) trap

It is so common for SPA (Single Page Applications like Angular, React, etc) to incorporate HashLocationStrategy(#) to URL in order to avoid reloading the page, every time user requests a new page. However, SEO considers # in the URL as Anchor link aka Jump links, meaning the link which allows one to jump to one section of the same page. SEO indexes all the pages with hash as a single page, hence the visibility of the pages are jeopardised.

Href in Anchor tag

Good URLs are critical for SEO. Google or other search engines finds the links on the website to get more information about the site. Make sure the link is mentioned in href and not buried in a javascript function and also make it descriptive.

Avoid query parameter, use path variable

Query parameter (URL with ? and has key-value pair) does not look trustworthy and proven to be less clickable. So, instead of wasting the crawling budget on complex multiple query parameters, use a simple path variable (without ? and has only value) for increasing the traffic of the website.

Image Alt Text

The alt attribute in the image tag provides the description of the image if the image cannot load due to a poor internet connection.

Image Alt text shows in slow connection

Why? Alt text ensures your images are accessible to screen readers and helps search engines understand your visual content, improving both accessibility and SEO.

Mobile Friendly

The mobile users are more prevalent than desktop users. As of July 2020, 50% of users are mobile users and the rest are desktop and tablet users. Google has made the move to mobile-first indexing. The below factors affect the SEO rating for mobile:

• Page speed: Due to the flaky internet connection (traveling etc), page speed is an important factor to be considered while developing mobile-friendly sites. Page speed is the time taken to fully display the content on a specific page. There are many ways to improve the page speed like file compression, minification and optimising images.
• Responsive design: Use media queries to render DOM for mobile and also, to avoid accidental navigation clicks, this in-turn makes the site finger-friendly.

💡 Quick Tip: Setting this viewport meta tag in index.html will let you control the width, scaling and renders well on all devices.