We've read about some of the standard SEO tactics one can employ to improve their rank with search engines, such as basic page layout, keywords, etc. Having spent some time working as a software engineer for a large online travel site, I figured I could call out a few more (potentially lesser-known) considerations we had to be mindful of to maintain a strong SEO presence:
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a navigational tool usually added near the top of a page to help a user show where they've been on your site, usually with arrows indicating the navigation path, with internal linking to previous pages. You can see an example here at the top of a TripAdvisor hotels page:
Lazy-loaded content
Often times websites will have content hidden behind a click, contained in a dropdown or a tooltip. This is a great way to make your page layout easier to navigate, but you have to be careful; as we've read, Google can ding you for hiding content on your page. If a bug was introduced on your site and the dropdown became unusable, you might get penalized for including content on the page that was inaccessible. By lazy-loading content (downloading content only once the user tries to access the resource), you can ensure you're never loading any unreachable content, with an added bonus of quicker page load times.
robots.txt
Google will only ever crawl so many urls to index a specific site, so you want to optimize how your pages are being indexed. At my old company, we had SEM-specific pages: pages that were specifically built for PPC traffic. We didn't want those to be crawled, because that would take away from the SEO of our other non-PPC pages. So, we added a little file called robots.txt (a web-standard text file read by search engines), which told Google not to crawl those specific pages. This essentially prevented SEO cannibalization from our other pages that showed up in the natural search results.
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