Is SEO knowledge important for web developers?

Question

Looking for some SEO (Search engine optimization) questions on Stackoverflow, I saw ambivalent reactions to these questions. Some were closed as "not programming related" or were downvoted, others were answered and got upvoted.

It seems that many developers think SEO was something "dirty" or belonged in the realm of spam. IMHO designing for search engines and practising SEO techniques adds important value to the final product like, for example, a good user interface.

Should SEO really be left to specialized non-programmers? Shouldn't web developers have profound SEO knowledge? Or is it okay to apply SEO as a post-development process?

Answer 1

Shouldn't web developers have profound SEO knowledge?

I think the creators of this site would be in a very good position to answer that question, and based on what I've seen here (and my own experience), the answer is a resounding yes!

SEO* is one of those things that nobody thinks about until it's too late. Neither the management team nor the system admins maintaining the site have the ability to affect change where this subject is concerned, so in most cases, the optimal scenario is one where the designer / developer employs SEO during the development cycle.

*When I say SEO, I mean things like alt tags, meta tags, css text-indent usage for buttons rendered as background images, and of course, a decent sitemap. I don't consider some of the more shady "SEO" tactics to fall within the scope of legitimate SEO.

Answer 2

I think you're right about SEO being "non-dirty". It is not the same as spam (we have a name for that: black-hat SEO).

Now of course many issues about SEO, like copywriting, consulting with client etc. should be probably left for a dedicated professional. But there are some issues, that the programmer should know to make the site more SEO-able.

For example:

• friendly URLs (like products/car instead of index.php?id=123&cat=5)
• meta tags (index/noindex etc)
• lean HTML, fast loading
• providing good possibilities for SEO professional to optimize the site (whatever it means)

Now IMHO you can't add all of these at the and (or you can, but with a high cost). Many of them affect design of application, so it's good to take them into consideration from the start.

Answer 3

I think it's similar to other design concerns like usability, accessibility, and graphic look and feel. It's good to have specialists with the deep and profound knowledge, but all developers should know enough about it to build "OK" solutions on their own and to know when they should ask the specialists for help. The specialists will be worrying about exactly which terms we should optimising for and how, and their detailed changes can generally be applied as a post-development step. However, the developers need to know enough not to produce a pathologically SEO-unfriendly solution before that step.

Your SEO experts can worry about eaxctly what goes in the title, h1 and description, but the developers need to be sure to make these things easy to optimise. More importantly, then need to know how site structure affects SEO, most obviously not hiding a whole section of the site behind a form or Javascript menu that spiders can't navigate, and not having many different URLs for the same content.

Answer 4

IMHO there are two kinds of SEO: the good and the bad. A web developer should definitely know about the good kind of SEO, for example:

• The value of a good URL structure
• Clean, concise, well thought out markup
• When to use a 301 and when to use a 302 header for redirects
• Forming good links (i.e. not "click here")

They shouldn't need to know about the bad kind, for example:

• Creating a link farm
• Spamming blogs etc.
• Hiding text (with CSS or javascript redirects)

Answer 5

Developers should definitely have a good knowledge of SEO techniques mainly because they are the same as good clean html development. By which i mean (to name a few) :

• Proper document structure, <h1> followed by <h2>, <p>, etc
• Ensure main content appears near the top of a page,
• Ensure page conforms to W3C accessibility standards,
• User friendly URL's,
• Clean separation of data, styles, client side scripting,
• Site Map,
• Meta data.

This will not only provide you with an SEO site but also and accessible and compatible site.

It is important to remember that SEO is not just about coding but also content. In these cases it's best to leave this to SEO specialist and content writer.

Answer 6

I think there should definitely a space for SEO at StackOverflow.

Proper web programming practice should take into account White Hat SEO understanding at every stage of development.

In order to do this the information has to be propagated and since there are few SEO knowledge sources out there geared toward the programmer SO seems very fitting.

Unfortunately the 'programming related' police can be quite intimidating to many would be questioners. While there is a need for proper moderation there is also a danger for over policing and not allowing coders to see the bigger picture of development.

I for one wish that the SEO tag will get lots of action.

Answer 7

I'd probably disagree with some people's scope of SEO. To me, SEO is the process of optimizing a website (code, architecture, content, etc) to maximise the 'status' of the website in common SEs and maximising the chances of the website being listed against a relevant search. Not that it really matters, but I wouldn't consider link farms and blog spamming as SEO any more than I would adwords or other PPC advertising.

And like previous posters, I do think it is an essential part of good web design; SEO should be one of the first considerations when preparing content for your site. It's a lot easier to put it in at the start, rather than retrofit.

The irony about SEO is that the most effective techniques are also the easiest; SEO is as more about not putting barriers in the way of your site being properly indexed by SEs, than it is about clever 'tricks' to improve your pagerank. So well-structured, pertinent content that is appropriately and semantically marked up, with appropriate use of headings, links & titles is the bulk of what is needed.

I suppose I consider it a shame that have an SEO tag on SO; surely it should simply be a part of 'best-practice'?

Answer 8

I have been developing web sites without much thought on SEO. I went with some colleagues to a "guru" to learn some more - thought that the meeting was more for the marketing people (you know writing stuff on the page the right way). I was wrong! I started doing some small adjustments such as putting the viewstate to the bottom, and giving a bit more thought into which controls and stuff i use on my page (a post on that at the same link as above). It quickly started to improve, our rankings improved and we got more traffic (much more traffic after i was done with all pages)

Answer 9

Definately Yes!

Usually SEO is performed by non technical marketing types... and they lack the real understanding of the technicalities of what is going on behind SEO and within a search engine... they are generally riding the wave of whatever is hyped up to be considered the next big thing, because they are sheep, not because they truly understand how it is delivering value... and they alway lack the technical skills to implement their SEO strategies.

If you have very strong technical skills, understanding of the web and SEO... and you are commercially aware... you have a powerful combination... you can make some serious money!

Answer 10

i think for a web developer you should know the bare-basics of on-page SEO at least

things like:

• Each page has a unique browser page title
• If there's a lot of JavaScript, it’s kept in an external include file
• The amount of text content exceeds the amount of HTML code

for a 20-point checklist, see Bare Minimum On-Page SEO

if you build a business presence website and this stuff is missing, its a little unprofessional

i dont believe a web developer needs to have extensive knowledge of off-page seo though, that is starting to get within the territory of an seo specialist or web marketer

-- LM