Fundamentals of SEO and software development
Why your developers & SEO specialists should work together to keep your website healthy
Primum non nocere
Medical students around the world are taught an important credo (1):
First, to do no harm
This phrase can be applied to many aspects of life, including software development and Search Engine Optimization. Mistakes happen and the sooner you can detect them, the better your website performance will be. This requires teamwork.
The pillars of SEO
Preventing errors and bugs from happening can keep your website healthy and may help to maintain your rankings.
SEO is complex and many facets influence ranking (2). Generally, all factors fall into three categories. These are the pillars of SEO:
- Great content
- High authority
- Optimized platform (Technical SEO)
Unfortunately, the technical aspects are often forgotten. Technical aspects require a high skill level and deep knowledge. It requires specialists.
Technical errors often keep a website from ranking well and sometimes ranking at all. No amount of quality content is going to fix that.
A high ranking website is like trust. It’s very hard to attain it and can be lost in an instant. Broken pages, missing canonical tags, a wrong Hreflang implementation or a spider trap with thousands of duplicate URLs can harm your website greatly.
To maintain a high position in the Search Engine Results Page, you need a fast and stable platform, that is optimized for visitors and crawlers.
Daily releases
Cloud computing platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud Platform add complexity to developing a modern e-commerce website. Aspects that can make development more complex are:
- The size of the development team
- The number of releases
- Legacy code (maturity of your application)
The effects amplify each other as well. If you have more developers and legacy code, bugs and errors are bound to arise. It’s also very likely that the interval between releases is shorter.
With more releases, it’s harder to pinpoint exactly when errors started occurring. Let’s say you notice a huge traffic drop and discover that it was caused by canonical URLs disappearing. When you release every day it’s difficult to determine which release caused the error to appear. If you deploy just once per month it’s much easier to determine where the error originated.
The system inevitably becomes prone to errors. And since errors and bugs are a continuous threat to a healthy website and SEO performance, prevention is the highest priority.
Caution wet floor
Teamwork and effort are required to keep applications stable and organic traffic optimal. However, most developers have no deep knowledge about SEO and most SEO specialists do not have a great understanding of software development.
A successful search strategy requires developers to understand the basics of SEO and SEO specialists to understand the fundamentals of the development process.
It’s a shared responsibility.
So what if you don’t work together?
When you don’t focus on collaborating, search engine optimization will be a mess. And the job of an SEO specialist is comparable to that of a janitor. You end up cleaning messes, fixing small issues and wiping the floor. With no chance to reach the ceiling of your traffic. As a consequence, there is no time left to attract new customers with awesome content and products.
For the developers, it won’t be any better. They are the figurative children that get bullied by the janitor into cleaning up their mess. They don’t like fixing bugs. They want to learn, explore, create awesome content and products.
And so both parties become unhappy.
Do you want to succeed in highly competitive e-commerce? Then don’t treat your search specialists like janitors or your developers like bug-fixers.
After all, SEO is a shared responsibility in complex developing environments.
Bibliography
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