A Introduction to SEO Developer

According to a 2012 study of research conducted by the Pew Research Center, "91% of adults use search engines to find information on the web [and] on any given day, 59% of those using the internet use search engines." It's also recognized that software developers use search engines to solve problems, from troubleshooting to searching for documents. (And If you're extremely interested, I found a peer-reviewed research paper on this as well..) Internet users and developers alike usually begin their search by typing in an inquiry in the search bar of a website.

This simple process (to us as end-users) lets us access information in a flash. The complexity of the search is abstracted to us. We don't need to consider the ways search engines knew precisely what you were looking for and navigate through billions of websites to deliver the most relevant content to the query you're looking for. On the other hand, we have algorithms that run search engines. We aren't sure what they do, but we know that they could make predictions based on the behaviour of users (and certain algorithms have a number of factors that influence how websites are ranked). On the other hand, many experts are looking for ways to improve the performance of websites so that they show up on the front page of results. This is known as SEO or search engine optimization. Or SEO.

How does SEO connect to software developers? There may be a freelance blog or personal website, or perhaps you're on a team of engineers for a website. In all cases, you'll like your website to be indexable by search engines to bring in users who may not be aware of who you are yet, considering your site's content (or business) fascinating. Because the majority of people who use the internet begin their search on search engines, it is important for your website to appear on search engines.

Let's say that you've created your own blog using the domain you own. If you're writing for yourself, the chances are that you would like readers to see your blog posts. Your blog posts are likely to be shared with others. Posts on social media platforms or publish them on websites for developers, such as DEV Community. You might have researched ways to increase your readership or gaining more readers to your blog. What happens if you don't blog but instead screencast your videos on YouTube instead? SEO can benefit you in the same way regardless of whether a user begins their search on your Google Search bar or YouTube's. Utilizing SEO assists you in sending the right messages to potential visitors. This is how you say to your visitors, "Hey, I have the answer to your question!" or "I offer the solution to your problem."

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the improvement of the quality of site content so that it ranks higher in results from a search. According to a 2017 article by Forbes, only 25% of users visit the first page of results. (There's an expression used in the industry used to describe the pages that are listed: search engine results page (also known as SERPs.) Therefore, people, companies and other entities can choose to get to the top page: by paying for advertisements and search engine optimize. People pay a lot of dollars in order to access tools as well as experts to be more prominent in organic results. (Website traffic that is not a result of ads search results is referred to as "organic search". The traffic generated by ads appearing in search results is referred to as "paid search.".)

However, the reality is that no one, not even the highest-priced and knowledgeable SEO consultant ensure that you'll appear on the first page of results, regardless of how hard you've optimized your content to be search engine friendly. There are many methods people attempt to "game" search algorithms using SEO even when their content isn't very good or useful. This is known as SEO spam and can be profitable. That's right. It's possible to spend a lot of time and money to study and apply the various SEO methods and tools out on the market and not get to the first page.

What Search Engines See on Your Site

When a lot of developers think about the structure of their site, one of the things that pop into their thoughts is probably the web development framework. Developers should think about how the framework structures information, where and how information is stored, and how to implement modifications or updates to a page via the site.

However, content strategists and search engines view structure in a different way. Site structure, in this angle, is how information (webpages texts, images, text and other types of content) is put together. If your website is like a house, then the structure of your site will be the frames (the steam or wood beams that form part of the building's "skeleton"). The structure of the site, constructed using a plan, serves as the base. It's what separates the rooms in a home, as well as their entry points as well as house frames, include windows, doors, walkways, as well as other aspects that are related to the specific room as well as the space around it.

Websites are created for certain purposes, and visitors come to our websites to satisfy certain requirements. People visit websites to stay updated, gain access to data, or alter information. Our mission is to assist people in taking whatever action they want on our site by giving them the appropriate information and direct them in the correct direction.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines crawl websites to discover how data is organized. Most often, websites prepare and send an online map (in XML format) to search engines that outlines how webpages are classified. Websites also need to provide a "robot exclusion standard" file that is also referred to as the robots.txt file. It informs search engines of which websites to crawl and which ones to index, and the websites to exclude from the search results. For instance, an e-commerce website might wish to have its blog, product as well as about pages to be crawled; however, they would like to remove the checkout page and buy confirmation webpage. If you have pages that are only accessible to members, You can also exclude these pages in search engine results by including those in your robots.txt file.

On the website the site itself, search engines search for information on information (or metadata) such as titles of pages headers, descriptions, hyperlinks, and structured JSON. They also look to find keywords that they can utilize to index pages in relevant results of searches. The majority of this metadata is accessible as HTML tags and attributes. (Many web builders and static generators can simplify this for you, meaning you don't have to work with HTML to get this data added.)

The crawlers of search engines aren't "smart" in that they can't discern the meaning of a page from "looking" at a page like we do. They are unable to determine if the content on a page is useful, relevant or of high quality. The only thing it can do is assess relevance based on the keywords used as well as the connections between pages of a website.

Although we don't know everything about how the various search engines function (the Google search algorithm reportedly includes more than 300 search results containing elements) however, we do are aware that search engines take into account page load times and HTML tags when determining how well websites rank.

You can choose you to want to "hide" a page from search results, such as checkout pages on websites that sell e-commerce or pages that are part of a members-only section or pages which have been removed from your website.

What Your Site Should Allow You to Do

Whatever platform you're hosting your site on, you'll like it to permit you to accomplish these things:

Create or create an online sitemap
Make your URLs unique
Create redirects if necessary
Include structured data
Descriptions of the craft and editing page titles
Make alt-text available to images. You can add alt-text to
Compress images
Create 404 pages for just in the event

Alongside free SEO tools, the ability to modify the elements of your website SEO allows you to control how your content is organized, which impacts not just you're rankings but also your overall experience.

Benefits of SEO: A Short Case Study

In 2017 I was in charge of overseeing the Bundler's content strategy. ( Bundler is the dependency manager for the Ruby programming language.) Part of my job was to in making the information of the Bundler.io documentation website easier for visitors to find.

I performed an SEO audit on the Bundler website as well as a competitor analysis of the three open-source software documentation sites to understand the best practices they were using in terms of how best to implement the best practices to our documentation.

An SEO audit was the most informative part. I noticed issues with titles that caused visitors to be unable to know what they meant in relation to the other documents site. They also did not provide any information about what the visitors could expect to learn or do. I came up with a standard title scheme, updated the titles for the most current release, and also added more information to the landing page.

In the quarter following our audit, we noted this on our documents website:

An 8.38 per cent increase in the total page views compared to the prior period
A 7.17 per cent rise in the number of people who visit the sites via organic searches over the prior period
A 7.78 per cent increase in the average amount of time on the page in comparison to the previous time

In sum, these were truly remarkable improvements! We were able to accomplish this by devoting the time and energy to comprehend the issue and use SEO to aid us in creating clearer messaging and improve the results of organic searches.

Next Steps: Where to Go From Here

There is a myriad of books, sites and tools that you can utilize to learn the basics of SEO. I suggest that you look through the official documents of any platform or framework that isn't mentioned for SEO-related information.

This list of tools is free SEO tools I've used to enhance my website's SEO. They can help you come up with content ideas to making structured JSON for the various pages on my website and monitoring the performance of my site, and getting it ranked on search engines:

Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
Answer The Public: https://answerthepublic.com/
Schema.org (to learn about JSON structured for SEO)
Technical SEO Markup Generator: https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
WebPageTest: https://www.webpagetest.org/
Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Bing Webmaster Tools: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about

Do you want to know the best ways to implement these ideas on your website? Take a look at this Developer's Guide to SEO Audits course. You'll be taught which tools to employ and when to apply them, and be able to take home an SEO checklist and access to the video!

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