Developers, here are some tips to up your SEO game

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When it comes to SEO, web developers may have the most important role of all in the company.

“If the development team drops the ball, then the whole site can drop out of Google,” says SEO consultant Dan Clarke, who’s worked with clients like Groupon, Nissan, and Adidas.

He cites the example of a large gambling site in the UK which screwed up its SEO while rolling out a new design. They had a separate beta site, which the programmers blocked from being listed on Google.

However, when the changes went live, “the developers didn’t take off the command to block Google, and it wasn’t detected for a week or so. Large parts of the site went out of Google entirely,” says Dan.

“The SEO work that had taken several years to perfect was thrown out because of two rogue characters in the code of the page.”

That is why developers often need to double as in-house SEO experts, especially in smaller firms. In fact, programmers with sound grounding in SEO are frequently more attractive to employers, adds Dan.

Read on for pointers that’ll improve your SEO knowhow.

Be careful with single page applications (SPAs).

SPAs are hot. Infinite scrolling compels site visitors to consume more content in one session, leading to more advertising moolah.

But poorly implemented SPAs can kill your organic search traffic.

Twitter is a great example of an SPA.

“Angular or NodeJS websites use a lot of client-side scripting, which looks great and all, but is really problematic for Google and other bots to execute,” says Dan.

He recommends building pre-rendering fallbacks for search bots (using tools like Prerender.io), which ensure they can sniff your content despite the impenetrable javascript.

Avoid duplicate content within the site

Build SEO into your QA process

Own technical SEO

Don’t cheat Google

Throw weird code at Google, but not at work