Things that no web developer should forget (SEO)

There are just some things that no front end developer should ever forget. There are so many things that often fall to the bottom of the list when developing something for the web, none more so than the ones I'll be highlighting here. It's often easy to forget small details, but when they're in they could make a big difference, especially when it comes to SEO and accessibility.

Titles

Often in Firefox, I find myself with quite a few tags but some of them just show 'Untitled' which just isn't very useful. Some sort of identification is always welcome by the user, whether they've minimized or tabbed your page.

Background color

This is a trivial issue and probably less than 0.1% of people will ever even notice it, but I will and it's a commonly forgotten bit of CSS or HTML when white backgrounds are used.

Most, if not all, modern browsers have a white background set as the default, but if you change the settings to show a light grey background instead, you soon realize the number of developers who just simply forget an attribute when really, the case should be the opposite. This is something I picked up from a colleague of mine from my days at Monkeehouse, Zoe Blade.

Alt tags

Whatever your feelings about accessibility, I think it's something that should always be considered. Whether client's require it or not, it often leads to code that's valid. Alt tags should be used wherever possible.

Alt tags shouldn't be blank, but if there's nothing to say, don't say it. If you can't apply an alt tag, maybe consider making the image a background as this will keep it out of the page and hopefully increase load time for those not using visual browsers.

At the moment, my BBCode doesn't support this, so I am guilty of not following this rule on some occasions, but I plan to make the necessary changes very soon.

&

Ampersand's do not validate, so when called dynamically through a database or AJAX, make sure you call ampersands correctly! not & but an & followed by amp;

This should apply everywhere, be it content, links, titles or even meta data.

Summary

That's all I've got for now, but hopefully I can part with some more words of wisdom in the future. The tips I've posted above should help to make your code validate first time, rather than having to go back and tidy up little things at the end.