Some web designers and developers are too focused on link building that they forget one important component of dental SEO — optimizing the website’s backend. Little attention is given to optimizing a website’s code when, in fact, this helps make all those off-page SEO campaigns legitimate and successful.
The success of your dental SEO lies on its foundation—the website. This prime piece of space on the internet is yours to cultivate. Pay close attention to the fundamentals of a well-optimized website and you should be seeing good results in no time.
Clean Code
Cleaning the code is simple for most programmers. They just have to make sure that Google will be able to understand your website’s language. This allows the search engine to index the website and include it in its search result.
Clean code is also significant in the loading speed of a webpage and dental SEO. Remember that web users will typically leave your site if it doesn’t load in four seconds. In fact, studies found that 25% of web visitors leave a website if it doesn’t load that fast.
The clean code will make your site load faster and Google will reward you for it by indexing your site higher. You can also use several tools that will determine the loading speed of your site, as well as to measure the JavaScript, redirects, CSS, and more.
Crawlability
Perhaps, there are too many pages on your website for a search engine to go through. If it takes forever to find the information Google, for example, is searching for, it may not index your site at all. To improve your website’s crawlability, you need to remove dead-ends and broken links.
Remember that search engines read your website in seconds. It should be able to find a clear path to the information it seeks. Otherwise, it will move to the next site that offers the same information as yours.
You should create an XML Sitemap. This creates files and folders of the various pages that can be found on your website. Submit the sitemap to Google for easier indexing.
URL Readability
This is an easy one: make sure your URL address is readable to even the average internet user. That means using hyphens so words don’t get too confusing and avoiding dynamic URLs when possible. If there is a keyword in your URL, make sure it’s positioned at the start of the line. Also, if you’re going to transfer to a new site and your old URL becomes a 404, redirect the page to the new one by creating a 301 redirect map.