Search Engine Optimization With Django
April 12, 2020
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very complicated topic. A website can have the best looking design and artwork, but this does not matter if there is no visibiltiy. Here are some general tips for search engine optimization.
The basic objective of SEO is to make your website easier for the search engines to crawl it. The search engines must know what your website pages are about in order to better use them in their search results. One way to do this is through meta tags. The most important one I believe is the description. However, there are a lot of other useful meta tags that will help your website integrate better with social media. Facebook and Twitter have their own meta tags that will be used on their sites.
A website should have a sitemap. Fortunately, Django has in inbuilt way to automatically generate sitemaps. These maps give details and dates on every page on your website. This helps the search engine crawlers more efficiently know what your website is about.
Another part of SEO is to make sure your website has clean code and fast performance. The search engines will lower your search ranking score if your website seems sloppily done. Recently, the search engines have been lowering scores for websites that are not mobile friendly. There are now two reasons to make sure your website works on mobile platforms: the SEO rank score and accessibility to people who are using cell phones for web browsing. It is always a good idea to ensure that your website reaches the largest audience possible without much hassle.
Now I come to the most tricky part of SEO. One of the most important things that will determine your search rank is the number of links to your website. The search engines will read these links from other sites and count them. The more backlinks to your website, the more the search engines will consider your website valuable. Getting results from this could take some time. It is always an uphill battle to get established. One way to get these links is to use social media for the backlinks and possibly generate traffic. Signing up for industry specific websites might also be a good idea. An RSS feed could be used to post articles on social media or other sites that support this. I am currently trying this on this website.
The only other piece of advice is to check your websites the the tools available that will give you pointers on how to improve your search engine optimization. My personal tool of choice is Google Lighthouse. I believe the tool that is developed by the search engine itself is probably the most effective. There are a lot of tools out there that are more restrictive. They might be good too. Good luck optimizing.