SEO Requirements for a New Website in 2019

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Conclusion
Building websites is hard. Building SEO-friendly websites is even harder. It’s all too common that a development team’s members are high-fiving each other after a massive project, and yet it turns out that the website’s not up to contemporary SEO standards.
There are many reasons why this can happen. The four most common are:
The development team wasn’t briefed properly.
The development team wasn’t educated well enough by the SEO specialists.
SEOs were involved way too late in the process.
The development team thought they had “this SEO thing” covered.
Requirements engineering—figuring out what you need to build—is a true science and is essential for the success of every development project, on and off the web.
If you don’t know what the project’s goals are, what to build, and what standards to adhere to, how can you make the project successful and build exactly what your customer wants?
In this article we’ll cover all the SEO requirements you need to consider when building or maintaining a website. It’s useful for everyone in the process: the customer who wants to have the website built, the SEO specialists who are tasked with ensuring the new website is SEO-proof, and the web development firms that are doing the actual building.
Kim Dewe
London Consulting Team Lead, Distilled
Often it’s very easy for SEOs to be indignant about a lack of inclusion in the development process, or requirements not being hit. The thing is, that’s our job - to empathise, to explain the risks, to embed ourselves in the process, and to educate. Having the actual SEO down is the easy bit if that’s your entire job - the politics is the more delicate art.
When do SEO specialists need to be involved?
SEO specialists need to be involved before, during, and after the building of a new website. It’s important to keep them informed and updated whenever new websites are being built and changes are being made.
David Iwanow
Travel Network
New websites are often screwed up as they are rushed. SEO is left untouched until the last minute and content isn’t thoroughly thought through during the planning stages. Involve SEO specialists right from the start in order to prevent this from happening!
When you’re launching a new website development project, involve SEOs from the get-go, because the new website’s SEO requirements will heavily influence its price.
All too often, SEO specialists’ involvement in the development process starts way too late. They then quickly realize that the new website isn’t going to be SEO-proof as-is, so they compile a list of SEO requirements for which an additional budget is required. This results in a messy project flow, higher costs, and delays… none of which makes the customer happy!
Now let’s get our hands dirty and move on to the actual SEO requirements!
William Julian-Vicary LinkedIn
Technical Director, 3WhiteHats
Something we see time and time again, is SEO requirements getting de-prioritised by the development team and/or business stakeholder, often in favour of hitting the website launch deadlines. This can generally be avoided with strong communication between teams and involving the SEO team at the start of the project. If we only see your project a week before launch, we’re, more often than not, going to find something that could delay your launch.
No-brainers
All the requirements in this section are no-brainers. They’ve been industry standards for years, so they should come as no surprise to anyone.
Responsive design
A responsive design means that the design adjusts itself to the device it’s being used on. Responsive designs are great for both visitors and search engine crawlers. They a consistent experience for visitors to your website, regardless of the device they’re using. Google values websites that provide their visitors with a good mobile experience (and other search engine crawlers are doing the same). The reason behind this is that in late 2015, the number of mobile searches in Google surpassed the number of desktop searches. So making sure your website caters to mobile visitors is very important.
Responsive designs make SEO specialists’ lives easier as well, because they only have one URL to promote per page. In the past, you’d have separate desktop and mobile sites that would both get linked to from other websites, and you’d need to consolidate those link and relevancy signals. This would always be sub-optimal compared to just getting links to a single URL.
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Mobile friendliness
Accelerated Mobile Pages
If you’re working on a website for a publisher, then you need to consider implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). We don’t recommend implementing AMP for any other type of website.
AMP is an open-source initiative and format by Google with the aim of speeding up the web experience for mobile users. AMP pages are essentially stripped-down versions of pages that are optimized to load fast on mobile devices.
So why is AMP only useful for publishers? Because for publishers, it enables you to get into the Google News carousel, which can drive lots and lots of traffic… but other types of sites can’t benefit from this, which makes the cons outweigh the pros.
Continue reading about AMP
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
HTTPS
HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. It’s the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website you’re visiting. Using HTTPS makes it harder for people to try and eavesdrop on you.
Google’s been pushing for websites to adopt HTTPS and has made it into a minor ranking factor because of that. While it may help a little, it’s not going to provide a significant competitive edge in terms of SEO. To support their cause though, they’re showing the “Not Secure” notice in the URL for sites that contain forms and aren’t running on HTTPS.
Here’s an example:
Nowadays, HTTPS is a must-have. So any new website that’s being built today should be served over HTTPS. That’s why ContentKing can check a website to see if it’s available via HTTPS and whether its HTTPS certificate is valid:
Make sure to load all resources over HTTPS, because you want to avoid having so called ‘ mixed content ’ issues. Mixed content issues occur when some resourced are loaded over HTTP instead of HTTPS, thereby leaving the page unsafe.
Pro-tip: if you’ve got an existing website that’s not yet running on HTTPS, we recommend migrating to HTTPS as part of the website migration process .
Continue reading about HTTPS
A milestone for Chrome security: marking HTTP as “not secure”
Limit your use of JavaScript
A large part of SEO is focused on making it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl and index content correctly. Building a website using a JavaScript framework and relying on client-side rendering results in the complete opposite.
Although search engines can render web pages nowadays, it’s not a best practice to actually rely on that, because it results in your content getting crawled and indexed slowly. Instead, make sure to just feed plain HTML to search engines. And if you absolutely must use a JavaScript framework, make sure to use server-side rendering or a pre-rendering solution such as prerender.io.
The reasoning here is:
Search engines’ page-rendering resources are limited. Rendering a page can easily cost twenty times as many resources as crawling a regular HTML page, so search engines can only allocate a small portion of their resources to this. This results in waiting days, if not weeks, for your content to be indexed.
Content that isn’t indexed doesn’t rank. Until your content is indexed, you’ll get zero traffic from search engines.
SEO aside, client-side rendering also makes for a higher Time to Interactive (TTI). This means that visitors will have to wait longer before they’re able to interact with the page.
Continue reading about JavaScript
Barry Adams’ slides from Friends of Search 2018 “Technical SEO in 2018” (JavaScript SEO starts at slide 19).
Page Speed
Studies have shown that visitors like fast-loading pages. They decrease bounce rates and raise conversion rates. Amazon found that their revenue increased by 1% for every 100ms decrease in load time. On top of that, having fast loading pages helps your SEO. Especially if you’re taking on the competition on the first page of Google. There, page speed can really make a difference.
There are hundreds of tweaks you can make to your website and web server that will help you get better page speed, but here are the most common best practices that you should take into account:
Use a content delivery network
Limit the amount of JavaScript libraries that are loaded
Minify JavaScript and CSS files
Optimize your images
Reduce server response time to