SEO For Developers

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

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.

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.

Focus on Content

Google's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 to your website’s load times and uses this score as one of the factors in its ranking algorithms.