SEO For Developers — A Quick Overview

All you need to know about your role as a developer to improve your website’s position in Google search results.

Published in

Welldone Software

8 min readOct 7, 2019

The most important thing in getting a good rank in Google is to make your website engaging, useful, and original. Your role as a developer is to ensure it is accessible and smooth for users and correctly exposed to Google bots.

Let’s talk about what it takes to appear on the fabled top position on Google.

What is SEO?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It’s a set of guidelines that are supposed to make your site appear higher than others on Google search results. Specifically for organic (unpaid) search results.

We focus on Google in this article because it is by far the most dominant search engine worldwide. As the industry leader, Google sets the tone for the other search engines. Focusing on Google would probably still increase your performance on other search engines as well.

The Old Days Are Gone

I remember the “good old days”. Back in the 2000s, SEO meant doing a series of dirty tricks that would increase a website’s rank on Google.

For example, people placed huge lists of keywords on the bottom of their web pages. They would also sometimes repeat the keywords 1000 times and maybe put them in white or inside an invisible div. Google was tricked to promote their rank.

These days are gone. Google hires the best minds in the world to make sure their users only get the most useful web pages for searches. The exploits above, and many more, are mapped in “Google Quality Guidelines”. If your product contains any violations of these guidelines for some reason, even if they got there by mistake, I strongly suggest getting rid of them because Google now penalizes websites for violations of their guidelines.

Google Always Changes

Google’s ranking algorithm is very complex. Google’s experts work on these algorithms for years. Nowadays, Google gets updated daily, with bigger updates released once or twice a year.

Information about how Google ranks pages is being published all the time, and sometimes extra information gets leaked. Several websites try to track these updates and understand how if affects SEO. For example:

Focus on Content

Google search engine’s goal is to find the most useful results for the searches their users perform. Google constantly improves in doing so.

The point is that short term tricks sometimes could get you good results in terms of SEO but might not work after an arbitrary algorithm change.

Focusing on content is extremely important because your content and the value of your website for your users shouldn’t change when Google’s algorithms change.

What kind of content? That’s the million dollar question. You probably know the answer already.

The most important thing in getting a good rank in Google is to make your website engaging, useful, and original. Your role as a developer is to ensure it is accessible and smooth for users and correctly exposed to Google bots.

Another essential term in this regard is “content SEO”. This terms is defined as “the practice of producing content that ranks high on search engines”. It includes everything from researching what users are interested in using “keyword research” to structuring your website in a way that is optimized for search engines.

This practice is effective nowadays, but it might also result in a lot of content being written solely for Google without any benefit to your users. It works today indeed, but an arbitrary algorithm change might obsolete it.

Authority Matters

If you have experience or certifications in the field of what you are writing about, Google would view your website as having a higher potential of providing reliable and quality information.

For example, Google would most likely promote medical advise from Medical Doctors (M.D.). People without this degree can write about these issues and even being relevant, Google may not rank them as high.

And indeed, in fields that impact people’s lives acutely and directly authority becomes a key factor in SEO. These fields are abbreviated as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) and include money, health, news, legal, etc...

Developers Are Not Omnipotent!

Think about it!

These super critical elements of SEO are usually not even in the hands of developers! (And if they are, it means that they wear “several hats”- developers, content creators, market researchers, ui/ux, etc...)

For example, developers are not responsible for getting an MD degree to boost the website’s authority.

Developers are, however, responsible for exposing an about page where this authority regarding the company’s medical stuff is accessible both to users and Google bots.

We will talk about what a developer should do with an about page like this, but in general-
The about page should be fast, take accessibility into account, use the right semantic html tags, include the right structured data, be mobile friendly, use https, it should be a clear url, etc…

Be Data Driven

Short pipelines, release cycles and good analytics would ensure that the people who are responsible for content can test different options to see how they work.

For example, Google uses the <title> tag as the title displayed in search results. With short pipelines, and good analytics, content creators can test different titles more frequently to see how users respond to each title.

Follow The Tools

The primary SEO tool is “Google Search Console”. It exposes a lot of information about websites from the perspective of Google. You can check what pages are indexed by Google and why, what Manifest.xml it uses, and if the site is considered compatible with mobile. But it’s mostly a more business-oriented SEO tool.

For developers, many tools can crawl the website and generate a list of more technical aspects of the site that can be improved. For example, if you don’t use the right headers or status codes. A few of them would be:

Best Practices

As you've seen, the topics so far would mostly concern people who deal with content and business aspects.

Assuming the content they manage to produce is indeed awesome and optimized for SEO, we as developers need to make sure the website is smooth, functional, and exposes this content to Google crawlers.

I suggest starting by reading “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide” where Google explains how to expose this content.

Here is a list of important best practices with links where you can read about them in depth:

<title> and <meta name=”description”> are the tags controlling how your web page is displayed on Google’s result pages.
HTML tags like header tags (h1, h2) and HTML attributes like the alt attribute on <img> tags, would help to create a structure to your web page so crawlers can interpret your content better.
Structured Data exposes information from your page like rank, location, opening hours, and prices to appear on Google search pages. The more information appears on the search page, the higher the chance of a web page to be clicked.
Make the web site mobile friendly.
Use the HTTPS protocol.
Make your website accessible to people with disabilities. Not only would your website be accessible to more people, Google would also reward you with a higher rank.
Use logical and meaningful site hierarchy-
example.com/RunningShoes/Womens
instead of
example.com/123123/123123
Watch your <a href> links-
* Each link has to have meaningful text.
* Tell google the nature of your links to external websites using extra attributes on the <a> tag. For example, rel=”nofollow” is used to let Google know you are not associated with the website you link to.
* Make sure every page you want Google to crawl is linked with an <a href> from the homepage (possibly through more then one link).
Make sure your content is not duplicated between different versions so they won’t compete with each other:
* Use 301 redirects if you’ve restructured your site so both versions won’t get indexed separately and compete with each other.
* Stick to one version of a website’s link:
http://www.example.com/page/ or http://www.example.com/page or http://www.example.com/page/index.html* Use <meta rel=”canonical”> tag to indicate different pages and URLs are holding the same content.
Localization- Use the hreflang meta tag to tells Google that a web page has different versions in different languages.
Make your website fast to score high on “Google PageSpeed Insights”.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Before even looking at how your website’s performance affects your SEO ranks, it is important to notice that users simply like fast websites and dislike slow ones. A website’s performance is one of the most important factors in user experience and consequently in conversion rates.

For the reason mentioned above, Google ranks fast websites higher. It uses PageSpeed Insights to assign a score your website’s load times and uses this score as one of the factors in it’s ranking algorithms.