9 ms·

What every Web Developer should know about SEO

108 points by tosbourn 12y ago

EC1 12y ago
This is also a pretty good set of guidelines by Google to follow: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...
rcarrigan87 12y ago
If you want to see how Google ranks your site speed and user friendliness check out google page speed insights. Very handy tool for guidance on what's slowing down your site. A constantly updated and properly marked up site map is also good to have.
- josefresco 12y ago
  I have no affiliation but do use GTmetrix quite a bit when optimizing client websites: http://gtmetrix.com/ http://gtmetrix.com/ It works like an aggregator of all the existing speed tools and provides a nice speed testing resource that is outside my local network.
deanclatworthy 12y ago
This is all basic stuff, but won't affect your rankings that much. Yes, everyone should have it in place, but doesn't represent the state of SEO. What you should know about SEO, is that it's all about getting organic links to your content, and having content that has a semantic connection to the keywords being searched for.
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  but then where will the "SEO expert" scumbags make money?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- tosbourn 12y ago
  That is outside of a typical developers remit though, I wrote this for developers on a team who don't think they need to worry about SEO.
mootothemax 12y ago
For JavaScript-heavy sites, I still recommend following Google's AJAX-crawling guidelines, and supporting the pre-rendered view request variable _escaped_fragment_ https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/... You can do a good enough job by sending such requests to a PhantomJS instance, waiting for the page to load, outputting the PhantomJS-rendered HTML to the browser, and saving the HTML to a cache for faster access next time.[1] There are also plenty of SaaS apps that will handle the pre-rendering for you. An additional bonus of doing this is that you can intercept requests from engines and services that don't support _escaped_fragment (e.g. Facebook external hit), and always ensure that you serve pre-rendered HTML to them. (e.g. by matching on the user-agent string). [1a] One potential hitch is knowing when a page has finished rendering. You could potentially set a variable in your code and have PhantomJS wait for that. [1b] One other hitch is that it's possible for PhantomJS to time out e.g. waiting for an external JS library to load. It's sensible to check that your HTML output looks vaguely sane before sending to the browser (e.g. for Angular, make sure there are no {{ }} blocks in the HTML), and sending a temporary error code if something looks odd.
- gildas 12y ago
  Another additional bonus of doing that is that you can serve "true" 404 pages (i.e. not soft 404) for invalid URLs when the page is requested with the _escaped_fragment_= query parameter.
  - mootothemax 12y ago
    Another additional bonus of doing is that you can serve "true" 404 pages (i.e. not soft 404) for invalid URLs when the page is requested with the _escaped_fragment_= query parameter. For one of our sites, the Angular router redirects the user to a "true" 404 page if the in-app page cannot be found, along with the troublesome URL. For example: https://example.com/products/name-does-not-exist/ https://example.com/products/name-does-not-exist/ Will do a JS redirect to: https://example.com/not-found/?url=/products/name-does-not-exist/ https://example.com/not-found/?url=/products/name-does-not-e... The /not-found/ URL serves a "true" 404 response. We're still in early days, and have very little data to back up the pros or cons of doing it this way. All I can say with any certainty is that for the several months now we have zero "soft" 404s listed in Webmaster Tools.
josefresco 12y ago
Some additional info... 1. Don't let the new HTML5 tags distract or confuse you. Google knows how to deal with traditional DIVs so only use the new tags (example: SECTION, ASIDE) if you know how to properly implement. 2. Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily. 3. Can't agree more with the section on redirects. 301's are often forgotten and can cause issues down the road with SEO and site functions. 4. The last tip I would add would be to monitor 404/access logs. Often times they will reveal SEO problems.
- mootothemax 12y ago
  Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily. Agreed. You might be able to gain a percentage point by inlining some vital CSS rules, but without hellish attention to details, that way madness lies.
  - butler14 12y ago
    Absolutely - it's also a complete waste of time from and SEO perspective, and represents a poor cost vs. benefit if your goal is to reduce bounce rate / increase conversion rate.
- conphill 12y ago
  I would say it is safe to say that having a mobile optimized site is something that you might want to be added to your list since it is now included into their ranking algorithm and as mobile devices become more common than desktops, this will only become more important.
alphadevx 12y ago
I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they want from you. I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.
- kendallpark 12y ago
  > I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now. Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts.
  - alphadevx 12y ago
    > Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts. Sure! Here goes... SEO was supposed to give you a competitive advantage, with your highly-optimized site appearing ahead of your (supposedly) less-optimized rivals in the search rankings. With the majority of above-the-fold space on Google being taken up by ads, those looking for free traffic via organic SEO are really just fighting for scraps. For the past few years, the companies I have been working with have been competing for rankings on relevant search key terms on Adwords with their rivals, meaning the guys with the biggest advertising budgets wins (and Google wins either way). Organic SEO does not suit Google, in terms of their business model. They want you to pay for placement.
    - kendallpark 12y ago
      When you talk about "organic" links do you mean non-advertising links from other websites like blogs/news sites? It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO. What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?
ssharp 12y ago
There is some good technical execution advice here, but the basic premonition is wrong: "From a development point of view SEO is the concern of how well a robot can read and understand your content. As we will see, a robot being able to read your content easily is normally a good thing for humans too." I don't think we need different points of view of what SEO is. SEO is about getting your page ranked as high as possible for whatever keywords you're targeting. Technical execution is a tactic that supports that, not a different view of it.
programminggeek 12y ago
For basic on page SEO when you are building a site, this is all good and useful information. Developers should also know that creating good technical content and open source projects on your site will over time generate links and attention for your website. While those links aren't going directly to your product pages, the long term benefit of those pages linking back to your main company pages/products will help those pages rank, which makes you money. It's a bit indirect, but still is worthwhile.
bhhaskin 12y ago
I have never seen additional semantic attributes done in json before. Json-ld seems kinda neat.
- blacksmith_tb 12y ago
  One handy use of it is inviting Googlebot to find your site search, like so: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/sitelinkssearch https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/siteli...
bsimpson 12y ago
I'm surprised he didn't mention using kebab-case vs snake_case in his URLs section. Google recommends kebab-case and will afford a small SEO bump accordingly.
- tosbourn 12y ago
  Author here: Good point, you are indeed correct. I will add it to my list of additions/corrections.
mbesto 12y ago
Does anyone have any real evidence to support higher rankings for an increase in speed? Like, if I increased my speed from 5s to 4s page loading, I saw X amount of increase on traffic. Reason being - all too often I see SEO developers use this as a hook to sell their services to clients to be able to get into their codebase.
- Polemicist 12y ago
  It's very hard to isolate any single ranking factor and attribute specific traffic increases to it, but overall what we know about load speed and Google rankings strongly implies a correlation there. Moreover, Google has come out and said it's a factor. Not that we can always trust everything Google says, but in this case it aligns well with their efforts to optimise crawl efficiency. Faster loading websites means more efficient crawling, which helps Google. And if Google recommends something it benefits from itself, it's a safe bet to assume it actually benefits your website's visibility in Google's search results as well. Google is, after all, very adept at the carrot & stick approach to making webmasters do what it wants them to.
lucisferre 12y ago
Where is the evidence presented that supports any of these claims? I realize most of the seem like common sense but as far as I know many are in fact false. In particular, the argument about semantic markup seems pretty dubious. Currently, I'm not aware of any search engine that cares about new HTML5 semantic tags. On that note, is there even even one example of assistive technology that uses semantic markup? As I understand it ARIA tags are needed for this, semantic markup is irrelevant since most (all?) assistive technology is outdated as far as browser technology goes.
aakash 12y ago
This talk makes so much sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1nNkS4SVRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1nNkS4SVRw I first thought the article is written on similar lines of sarcasm.

108 points by tosbourn 12y ago

EC1 12y ago

This is also a pretty good set of guidelines by Google to follow: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

rcarrigan87 12y ago

If you want to see how Google ranks your site speed and user friendliness check out google page speed insights. Very handy tool for guidance on what's slowing down your site. A constantly updated and properly marked up site map is also good to have.

josefresco 12y ago
I have no affiliation but do use GTmetrix quite a bit when optimizing client websites: http://gtmetrix.com/ http://gtmetrix.com/ It works like an aggregator of all the existing speed tools and provides a nice speed testing resource that is outside my local network.

deanclatworthy 12y ago

This is all basic stuff, but won't affect your rankings that much. Yes, everyone should have it in place, but doesn't represent the state of SEO. What you should know about SEO, is that it's all about getting organic links to your content, and having content that has a semantic connection to the keywords being searched for.

BrainInAJar 12y ago
but then where will the "SEO expert" scumbags make money?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
tosbourn 12y ago
That is outside of a typical developers remit though, I wrote this for developers on a team who don't think they need to worry about SEO.

mootothemax 12y ago

For JavaScript-heavy sites, I still recommend following Google's AJAX-crawling guidelines, and supporting the pre-rendered view request variable _escaped_fragment_ https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/... You can do a good enough job by sending such requests to a PhantomJS instance, waiting for the page to load, outputting the PhantomJS-rendered HTML to the browser, and saving the HTML to a cache for faster access next time.[1] There are also plenty of SaaS apps that will handle the pre-rendering for you. An additional bonus of doing this is that you can intercept requests from engines and services that don't support _escaped_fragment (e.g. Facebook external hit), and always ensure that you serve pre-rendered HTML to them. (e.g. by matching on the user-agent string). [1a] One potential hitch is knowing when a page has finished rendering. You could potentially set a variable in your code and have PhantomJS wait for that. [1b] One other hitch is that it's possible for PhantomJS to time out e.g. waiting for an external JS library to load. It's sensible to check that your HTML output looks vaguely sane before sending to the browser (e.g. for Angular, make sure there are no {{ }} blocks in the HTML), and sending a temporary error code if something looks odd.

gildas 12y ago
Another additional bonus of doing that is that you can serve "true" 404 pages (i.e. not soft 404) for invalid URLs when the page is requested with the _escaped_fragment_= query parameter.
- mootothemax 12y ago
  Another additional bonus of doing is that you can serve "true" 404 pages (i.e. not soft 404) for invalid URLs when the page is requested with the _escaped_fragment_= query parameter. For one of our sites, the Angular router redirects the user to a "true" 404 page if the in-app page cannot be found, along with the troublesome URL. For example: https://example.com/products/name-does-not-exist/ https://example.com/products/name-does-not-exist/ Will do a JS redirect to: https://example.com/not-found/?url=/products/name-does-not-exist/ https://example.com/not-found/?url=/products/name-does-not-e... The /not-found/ URL serves a "true" 404 response. We're still in early days, and have very little data to back up the pros or cons of doing it this way. All I can say with any certainty is that for the several months now we have zero "soft" 404s listed in Webmaster Tools.

josefresco 12y ago

Some additional info... 1. Don't let the new HTML5 tags distract or confuse you. Google knows how to deal with traditional DIVs so only use the new tags (example: SECTION, ASIDE) if you know how to properly implement. 2. Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily. 3. Can't agree more with the section on redirects. 301's are often forgotten and can cause issues down the road with SEO and site functions. 4. The last tip I would add would be to monitor 404/access logs. Often times they will reveal SEO problems.

mootothemax 12y ago
Maintainability is a big one for page speed optimizations. You can easily get 95% there but that remaining 5% often comes at the expense of maintenance, and the ability to see/make changes easily. Agreed. You might be able to gain a percentage point by inlining some vital CSS rules, but without hellish attention to details, that way madness lies.
- butler14 12y ago
  Absolutely - it's also a complete waste of time from and SEO perspective, and represents a poor cost vs. benefit if your goal is to reduce bounce rate / increase conversion rate.
conphill 12y ago
I would say it is safe to say that having a mobile optimized site is something that you might want to be added to your list since it is now included into their ranking algorithm and as mobile devices become more common than desktops, this will only become more important.

alphadevx 12y ago

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd. Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they want from you. I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.

kendallpark 12y ago
> I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now. Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts.
- alphadevx 12y ago
  > Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts. Sure! Here goes... SEO was supposed to give you a competitive advantage, with your highly-optimized site appearing ahead of your (supposedly) less-optimized rivals in the search rankings. With the majority of above-the-fold space on Google being taken up by ads, those looking for free traffic via organic SEO are really just fighting for scraps. For the past few years, the companies I have been working with have been competing for rankings on relevant search key terms on Adwords with their rivals, meaning the guys with the biggest advertising budgets wins (and Google wins either way). Organic SEO does not suit Google, in terms of their business model. They want you to pay for placement.
  - kendallpark 12y ago
    When you talk about "organic" links do you mean non-advertising links from other websites like blogs/news sites? It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO. What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?

ssharp 12y ago

There is some good technical execution advice here, but the basic premonition is wrong: "From a development point of view SEO is the concern of how well a robot can read and understand your content. As we will see, a robot being able to read your content easily is normally a good thing for humans too." I don't think we need different points of view of what SEO is. SEO is about getting your page ranked as high as possible for whatever keywords you're targeting. Technical execution is a tactic that supports that, not a different view of it.

programminggeek 12y ago

For basic on page SEO when you are building a site, this is all good and useful information. Developers should also know that creating good technical content and open source projects on your site will over time generate links and attention for your website. While those links aren't going directly to your product pages, the long term benefit of those pages linking back to your main company pages/products will help those pages rank, which makes you money. It's a bit indirect, but still is worthwhile.

bhhaskin 12y ago

I have never seen additional semantic attributes done in json before. Json-ld seems kinda neat.

blacksmith_tb 12y ago
One handy use of it is inviting Googlebot to find your site search, like so: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/sitelinkssearch https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/siteli...

bsimpson 12y ago

I'm surprised he didn't mention using kebab-case vs snake_case in his URLs section. Google recommends kebab-case and will afford a small SEO bump accordingly.

tosbourn 12y ago
Author here: Good point, you are indeed correct. I will add it to my list of additions/corrections.

mbesto 12y ago

Does anyone have any real evidence to support higher rankings for an increase in speed? Like, if I increased my speed from 5s to 4s page loading, I saw X amount of increase on traffic. Reason being - all too often I see SEO developers use this as a hook to sell their services to clients to be able to get into their codebase.

Polemicist 12y ago
It's very hard to isolate any single ranking factor and attribute specific traffic increases to it, but overall what we know about load speed and Google rankings strongly implies a correlation there. Moreover, Google has come out and said it's a factor. Not that we can always trust everything Google says, but in this case it aligns well with their efforts to optimise crawl efficiency. Faster loading websites means more efficient crawling, which helps Google. And if Google recommends something it benefits from itself, it's a safe bet to assume it actually benefits your website's visibility in Google's search results as well. Google is, after all, very adept at the carrot & stick approach to making webmasters do what it wants them to.

lucisferre 12y ago

Where is the evidence presented that supports any of these claims? I realize most of the seem like common sense but as far as I know many are in fact false. In particular, the argument about semantic markup seems pretty dubious. Currently, I'm not aware of any search engine that cares about new HTML5 semantic tags. On that note, is there even even one example of assistive technology that uses semantic markup? As I understand it ARIA tags are needed for this, semantic markup is irrelevant since most (all?) assistive technology is outdated as far as browser technology goes.

aakash 12y ago

This talk makes so much sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1nNkS4SVRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1nNkS4SVRw I first thought the article is written on similar lines of sarcasm.