The Role of Developers in SEO is Critical

What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising a website in order to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is important because the higher a website ranks in search results, the more likely it is to be visited by users.

SEO involves making various technical and creative changes to a website, including the use of keywords, meta tags, and structured data, as well as creating high-quality, relevant content and building inbound links. By improving a website's SEO, businesses and organisations can reach more people, increase their online visibility, and ultimately drive more traffic and conversions to their site.

SEO is often associated with the responsibilities of digital marketers and content creators, as they are the ones who typically handle tasks such as keyword research, meta tag optimisation, and content creation. However, it's important to understand that developers also play a crucial role in improving a website's search engine rankings.

There are several technical elements of a website that can greatly impact its SEO, such as its crawlability, page speed, and mobile optimisation, which are all areas where developers can make significant contributions.

Crawlability
Crawlability refers to the ability of search engine bots to access, read, and index the pages of a website. In other words, it's the ease with which search engine bots can "crawl" a website and discover its pages.

A website that is well-designed and properly structured is more likely to be crawlable than one that is not. Factors that can affect crawlability include the use of clean URLs, proper internal linking, and the presence of an XML sitemap.

Google Search Console offers a basic Log File Analysis insight which can be useful for debugging issues:

If a website is not crawlable, it means that search engines will have a difficult time discovering and indexing its pages, which can negatively impact its visibility and search engine rankings. If a search engine bot is unable to access certain parts of the website or certain pages, those pages will not be indexed and will not show up in the search engine results.

So Crawlability plays a crucial role in SEO as it ensures that search engines can find, index and understand the structure and context of a website's pages.

Some common ways to improve crawlability include:

1. Creating and submitting an XML sitemap: Here’s an example: https://www.gowerlive.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml. This should cointain a concise list of your websites URL's
2. Creating clean and simple URLs - Here’s Google’s URL Guide for developers
3. Avoiding broken links - i.e. 404 Server Response
4. Reducing the number of redirects i.e. 301/302 Server Responses
5. Using a robots.txt file to block irrelevant or unnecessary pages from being indexed. Here’s an example: https://www.gowerlive.co.uk/robots.txt
6. Enabling and using a 301 redirects to update URLs when you change page structure. These should only really be used for inbound links from external sources. If you control the code base there should be very few scenarios where links internally are being 301/302 redirected.
7. Making sure that the website is easily navigable, with a clear hierarchy and well-organised content.

In summary, Crawlability is a critical aspect of SEO, and developers can play a key role in ensuring that a website is easily crawlable by search engines, by following best practices and avoiding common mistakes that can negatively impact a website's crawlability.

Speed
Page speed is a measure of how quickly a website's pages load and can greatly impact both SEO and user experience.

If Amazon slow down their infrastructure by 100milliseconds that will cost them 1% of profit. The BBC lost 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.

From an SEO perspective, page speed is a ranking factor used by search engines such as Google. This means that a website with faster page speed will be more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than a website with slower page speed. Search engines use page speed as a ranking factor because they want to provide users with the best possible search experience, and a website that loads quickly is more likely to provide a better user experience. Ultimately Google is giving us one of their customers and they want to provide their customer with the best experience.

From a user experience perspective, page speed is important because it can greatly impact how long it takes for a website's pages to load. If a website's pages take too long to load, users may become impatient and leave the site before the content is even visible, resulting in a high bounce rate/low engagement rate. A slow page speed may also drive users away from website because a website that load faster offers better user experience.

To improve page speed, there are several best practices and techniques that developers can use, such as:

1. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content from multiple servers. Simple changes such as switching your DNS to Cloudflare can save 100 milliseconds, and that simple change can improve conversion rates by 8% for ecommerce websites.
   Here is an example of a very fast DNS provider.
   
   Even though performance looks good from the UK. Crawlers typically originate from the US and so Search Engine crawlers see poor performance.
   

At this absolute root level of your technology stack, it could be costing businesses a lot in missed revenue.

2. Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code to reduce file size
3. Optimising images by compressing and properly sizing them. Cloudflare for example will automatically convert to JPEG to WebP for optimised delivery.
4. Enabling browser caching
5. Reducing the number of HTTP requests: Keep the code lean...try SVG Sprites.
6. Using the latest web technologies, like HTTP/2 - Test if your using it here
7. Identifying and Fixing all the issues found in page speed audit tools like Lighthouse available inside Chrome Dev Tools, Google PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix

It's worth noting that page speed is not just important for the initial page load, but also as you navigate through the website. A website with slow page speed can negatively impact user engagement and conversion rates. Therefore, it's important to make sure that a website's pages load quickly not just on the initial load but also as the user interacts with the site.

In summary, page speed is an important factor for both SEO and user experience, and developers can take various steps to improve a website's page speed, which in turn can help increase its search engine rankings and provide a better user experience.

Structured Data
Structured data is a way to mark up the content on a website with specific tags or code, which can help search engines understand the context, meaning and organisation of the content. This information can then be used to enhance the way that a webpage is displayed in search engine results pages (SERPs), making it more informative and user-friendly.

There are several different types of structured data that can be used, including:

1. Schema.org: A widely-used set of schemas (or code snippets) that can be added to a website's HTML to provide search engines with more information about the website's content.
2. JSON-LD: A type of structured data that uses JavaScript notation to provide search engines with more information about a website's content. This is the easiest type of Structured data to include.

    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org/",
      "@type": "Recipe",
      "name": "Party Coffee Cake",
      "author": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Mary Stone"
      },
      "datePublished": "2018-03-10",
      "description": "This coffee cake is awesome and perfect for parties.",
      "prepTime": "PT20M"
    }
    </script>

3. Microdata: A set of HTML tags that can be used to provide search engines with more information about a website's content. This is quite a fiddly process to map against yout HTML.

Structured data can be used to provide search engines with information such as the name of the website, its author, the date it was published, the main content of the page, the images and videos that it contains, and more. This information can be used to enhance the way that a webpage is displayed in SERPs, which can increase the click-through rate (CTR) and the overall visibility of the page.
Structured data can be used for many different types of content, such as:

1. Articles - Important for Blogs (Remember to include functionality to listen out for content changes)
2. Products - Important for eCommerce Products
3. Events
4. Local business information
5. Videos
6. Images
7. Courses

Here is Google documentation and lists all of the different types of schema that’s available so you can pick what is relevant to your application.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/search-gallery

Using structured data can greatly improve the user experience in SERPs by providing more information and making the results more interactive and easier to navigate.

In summary, structured data is a way to mark up the content on a website with specific tags or code, to help search engines understand the context, meaning, and organisation of the content. This information can be used to enhance the way that a webpage is displayed in SERPs, which can improve the user experience and increase the visibility and click-through rate of a webpage.

Mobile optimisation

Mobile optimisation is the process of making sure that a website is easily usable and accessible on a mobile device. It is important for both SEO and user experience because the majority of internet users now access the web on their mobile devices, and search engines like Google prioritise mobile-friendly sites in their search results.

From an SEO perspective, mobile optimisation is important because search engines like Google use mobile-first indexing. This means that the mobile version of a website is used to index and rank its pages in the search results. This is important because if a website is not mobile-friendly, it may not rank as well in the search results, which can result in fewer visitors and less visibility.

From a user experience perspective, mobile optimisation is important because it ensures that a website is easy to use on a mobile device. This includes having a layout that is easy to read and navigate, as well as functionality that works well on a touch screen. Additionally, mobile users have different needs and expectations, they have less space on the screen, they have a different way of interacting with the website and they are more likely to be on the go. A mobile-optimised website will provide a better user experience and can help increase engagement and conversions.

To optimise a website for mobile, there are several technical considerations that developers should keep in mind. These include:

1. Using a responsive design: A responsive design adapts the layout and functionality of a website to the size of the device's screen. This ensures that the website is easy to read and navigate on a mobile device.
2. Intrusive interstitials and dialogs: Intrusive interstitials and dialogs are page elements that obstruct users' view of the content, usually for promotional purposes. Interstitials are overlays on the whole page and dialogs are overlays only on a part of the page, sometimes also obfuscating the underlying content. They should be avoided as they can negatively impact the user experience and might be penalised by search engines.
3. Optimising images and fonts for smaller screens: Mobile screens are smaller than desktop screens, so images and fonts should be optimised to ensure that they are still easy to read on a mobile device.
4. Touchscreen navigation: Make sure navigation and buttons are large enough and easy to press with a finger.
5. Minimising the use of pages that require horizontal scrolling.
6. Optimising the loading speed: Mobile networks have less bandwidth, so it's important to make sure that pages load quickly.For excample in the UK the average mobile speed is little over 3G. You can use Chrome Inspect to throttle your connection to simulate performance on 3G devices. This will also allow you to inspect any Cumulative Layout Shifting which has an impact on Core Web Vitals...again a key performance metric in the eyes of Search Engines.

In summary, mobile optimisation is the process of making sure that a website is easily usable and accessible on a mobile device. It is important for both SEO and user experience. Developers should use a responsive design, avoid Flash and pop-ups, and optimise images and fonts for smaller screens in order to make sure that a website is mobile-friendly and provides a good user experience for mobile visitors.

Conclusion
Developers have a crucial role in improving a website's search engine rankings, by ensuring crawlability, optimising page speed, implementing structured data, and optimising the website for mobile devices. Crawlability, page speed, structured data, and mobile optimisation are important technical considerations for developers to keep in mind when working on a website.

However, SEO is not only a technical job, it's also a creative and strategic job. This is why it's important for developers to work together with digital marketers, to ensure that a website is fully optimised for search engines. Both teams should understand the basics of SEO, its best practices and stay updated with the latest trends and algorithm changes.

To learn more about SEO and stay up-to-date with the latest best practices, it's recommended to read popular industry blogs such as Moz and Search Engine Land. These blogs provide valuable insights and tips on all aspects of SEO, including technical optimization, content creation, and link building. One of our favourite sources of insight is from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/. By staying informed, developers and digital marketer can work together to improve a website's SEO and drive more traffic and conversions.