What Should Developers Pay Attention to When Developing a Seo-Ready Web App?

At Elit-Web, we often hear requests from clients that their products be easily searchable on Google and other search engines and ranked high. However, this process usually takes time unless you do pre-prod SEO — and that’s what we’ve started to do with our development partners at HUSPI.

Creating an SEO-ready web app involves paying attention to several key factors to ensure the site is optimized for search engines from the ground up. We’ve spoken to HUSPI’s development team about the things developers should pay attention to early in the development process to simplify the job for the SEO specialists. Here are their comments:

5 Areas for Developers to Optimize for SEO

Structure & Navigation

“We ensure the client’s site has a clear and logical structure with a well-organized navigation system, allowing users and search engines to easily find and index content. Besides the SEO, this foundational architecture helps us later in the development to scale the project, so it’s not a single-purpose activity. 

Regarding structure, a starting point for most is categories like Home, About, Services, Blog, and Contact. These five cover all the information needs of a visitor, and they are valid across all industries,” says Alex, HUSPI’s team lead. 

Zee Gimon, CMO, adds from a marketing perspective: “URLs also be clean and descriptive. Once again, this is something that developers have to clarify in the code. For example, instead of using a URL like huspi.com/page?id=12345, use a clean, descriptive URL like huspi.com/fintech-product-development/. This is easier for search engines to read and understand. The way we do it most often is that developers put in the URL “formula,” and later, the content people create the URLs. However, the foundation should be there already, or you’ll be stuck with gibberish.”

Mobile Optimization

“Majority of our clients need their web apps to be available from mobile phones, so my job as the frontend developer is to ensure that the website or web application is fully responsive and provides optimal user experience. For example, on a smartphone, the navigation menu might become a collapsible hamburger menu, and images and text resize to fit the smaller screen without needing horizontal scrolling.” shares Kate. “This is something that not many people think of because it became a norm, but sometimes this requires additional creative thinking when it comes to specific app’s features.”

Speed Optimization

“Besides the mobile optimization in terms of visuals, it is also critically important for SEO to be mindful of the load times. We improve page load times by minimizing heavy scripts, optimizing images, and leveraging browser caching. Fast-loading pages enhance user experience and are favored by search engines. Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse in the Console help to identify the weaker spots and optimize them,” says Alex.

Security

“Considering that we work with many personal data, security’s importance cannot be overstated. We ensure the client’s web app uses HTTPS to secure data transmission. Search engines prefer secure sites, and users trust them more. Also, people trust these websites more because their information remains personal,” adds Vitalii, another team lead.

Content & analytics

Zee shares “Since I work in the marketing and sales team, content and analytics are my area of expertise and passion. 

One has to think about several content categories that directly impact SEO. Title tags and meta descriptions are critical for search engines to understand the content.

For example, for a blog post about SEO tips, a good title tag might read “SEO Tips for Web Development  YourCompanyName,” and a meta description might read “Discover essential SEO tips for web development to enhance your site’s visibility and performance. Learn how to optimize your web app for search engines.”

Texts on the pages (whether it’s a blog post or a standard page) should be structured as well with the help of header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and this is also something that the content team, developers, and SEO people should be mindful of.

Retaining to the foundational content, schema markup should also be present and provide search engines with additional context about the content, enhancing search result listings with rich snippets and increasing visibility.

For all of the projects that we’ve worked on, we always set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console (as two primary tools with others depending on the requirements of the project.) This helps us to monitor the performance.”

Collaboration between Developers & SEO specialists

As we’ve mentioned above, search engine optimization does not fall under the tasks of only one person or even a team. To reach great results, developers and SEO specialists should collaborate. So, what are the primary tasks for each team?

Conclusion

Both technical SEO specialists and developers play crucial roles in achieving optimal SEO performance. While SEO specialists focus on strategy and optimization, developers bring these strategies to life through technical implementation. The collaboration between these roles is essential for creating and maintaining an SEO-friendly web app or website.

This is why Elit-Web and HUSPI became partners – to bring forth better products from the development and SEO point of view and provide our clients with outstanding software products that rank high on Google and beyond. 

If you’re looking for a development team to work with, contact HUSPI and we’d be happy to discuss your project ideas.