DEV Community

Filipe M. Silva
Filipe M. Silva

Posted on • Edited on

What you should know about SEO as a Web Developer!

Since 2009, I worked for small or large projects that involves optimizes sites for Google at some level. Some organizations I worked, seems an increase access around 50%, with some effort to improve the code and marketing team.

Algorithms changes and had a lot of those changes during the years, but some core concepts still working pretty well, for almost 14 years, so follow some basics to help you.

Don't exclude no one, develop for a blind person

Text in our computers it's something everyone can read, for blind people they can count with screen readers and understanding pretty well the content. Web born with interoperability and accessibility as core concepts to facilitate access for everyone, include people with screen readers.

Google was first developed and improved using HTML as his main base to search and rank sites, mainly because of accessibility HTML has.

So you should consider all people and give to Google a facilitated access similar to a blind person. Structured content, semantic tag and rely more on text content than visual ones.

Speed meters

What's the most fastest way to deliver an HTML after requested? That should be the answer you need to find when want a good SEO.

I saw a lot of new tools, trying to make miracle to deliver HTML at the end user, some tools try to parse JSX components in the back-end, another tools trying make a mixed of then. For some applications they can work pretty well, but for SEO NodeJS in general should be avoid, except when combine prepared HTML text, with another text, like Ghost does with Handlebars. Also take a look with care for tools made in PHP.

For large scale this kind of optimizations could save some money and headaches.

JS and CSS shouldn't be something slow and change HTML tag positions.

Be a structured person, to make bot spend time with you

Markdown could be a good example about generate structured text, you have Titles, Subtitles, Paragraphs. For sites link it's another good structure that help to give Googlebot context.

Links it's very important and you should place a lot of then point to another pages and point back to the content. The most time googlebot spent to understand some site, more relevant they became. Also it's much better with you have another contents point to your content. Blog post in dev.to would help you.

If need place schemas

Go to schema.org and try to structure your content with the JSON. That's no more, no less.

Monitor the search and increase content

After some weeks, go to webmasters tools, like google search console or bing search console.

These tools helps you with ideas for new content, what kind of page you could improve perfomance, world, terms and articles to write and gain more access.

Resuming

  • Don't exclude no one, develop for a blind person, accessibility and semantics matter
  • Focus on the response speed
  • Be a structured person and make bot spend time in your site
  • Learn about schemas and structured contents
  • Monitor the constantly the results

Top comments (3)

Collapse
 
gamerseo profile image
Gamerseo

Great guide for beginners.

Collapse
 
reytortugo profile image
ReyTortuga

This post really brightened my day! Thank you for sharing!

Collapse
 
flpms profile image
Filipe M. Silva

Thank you :)