Simple steps to Improve your website ranking on Google (SEO)

Recently, I had the chance to work on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for one of the projects. I learned a few things along the way. You can follow these steps:

Google doesn’t accept any payment to make any website rank better, it all depends on the content

PageSpeed Insights Report

You can check you app’s performance by using PageSpeed Insights. This tool provides a detailed analysis of what can be improved in your web app regarding performance, accessibility, SEO & best practices.

Server side rendering

Server-side rendered (SSR) apps are generally better for SEO because they deliver fully-built pages directly from the server to the browser. This allows search engines to easily access and index the content, improving visibility and ranking. In contrast, client-side rendered (CSR) apps initially send a basic HTML page and rely on JavaScript to build the content after loading. This can create a delay, making it more challenging for search engines, especially older crawlers, to find and index the content effectively, potentially impacting SEO negatively.

Title, Description and Keywords on every page

Add the following meta tags to the head of your webpage -

<title>Anoop Jadhav | Frontend Engineer</title>
<meta name="description" content="Frontend Engineer skilled in React and modern web technologies. View Anoop Jadhav's portfolio." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Anoop Jadhav, Frontend Engineer, React, Web Developer, Portfolio" />

Add sitemap.xml to your website

sitemap.xml contains all the links to all the internal pages/resources on your website. lean more about sitemap here.

This is how a sample sitemap.xml looks like -

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
        <loc>https://anoopjadhav.in/</loc>
        <lastmod>2024-09-30</lastmod>
        <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
        <priority>1.0</priority>
    </url>
    <!-- this is just a sample, ideally sitemaps can be huge, since it contains references to all the important resouces on your website-->
</urlset>

Once you have your sitemap ready, upload this to google search console. If you are new, signup on google search console, its completely free.

Also, keep this file in your public folder, so that it is publically accessible by crawlers.

for eg. - https://anoopjadhav.in/sitemap.xml

Add robot.txt to your website

This will help the crawler understand what part to the application is to be crawled and what part to avoid crawling (this will be useful when you don’t want certain parts of your application for eg api’s, private content to be visible to crawlers). learn more about crawlers here.

Symantic HTML Tags

using proper symantic tags can also help google understand your content better.
few examples -

Using <header> tag for header of the page, h1 tag for title of the page etc. <footer> for footer content, <nav> for navigation items. These are just few of the examples but there are a lot of tags you can explore here.

Interlinking pages

Interlinking page will help google find, index and undestand your pages better. It will also help the user navigate between pages easily.

Avoid gibberish content

Avoid gibberish content your website as it will affect the user experience and bounce rate which can degrade your ranking.

Thanks for reading.