Recently, there was a post over on YOUmoz about the naivete and misconceptions that developers have about SEOs written by cyberpunkdreams. He had gotten into a conversation with a group of developers who thought that SEOs were spammers and were only out to get bad sites at the top of the rankings. The dialogue on this topic is interesting, because at the same time that developers are thinking we're a bunch of spammers, we, as SEOs also have misconceptions about developers in general.Sure, there are many developers out there who may not specifically focus on SEO, nor do they have a keen knowledge of everything that goes into ranking well. But they are no dummies. They often are very analytical and can think through problems or come up with excellent solutions to issues. They can create an algorithm that will take 8 different pieces of data from the database and build dynamic title tags with length restrictions, keyword usage, and anything else you want to throw at them. Without our technical counterparts, our jobs would be pretty boring, since half of the tasks we need completed, we can't do on our own.
With all this said, I decided to run a little test and find out what developers felt were the top 5 changes they could make to a website to provide high SEO impact and value with a low level of effort. I set out on a mission to contact developers through Twitter, Faceboook, email and IM. As I'm writing this I'm wondering now if they wondered what the heck I was asking them this question for. Little did they know they were going to be quoted in this post. :)
Top 5 SEO Changes
This list is derived directly from the responses I received via Twitter, Facebook, IM and email from 13 different developers. With that, here's a list of ways developers can optimize their site for highest impact, with the lowest amount of effort, from their perspectives.- Title Tag
This was overwhelmingly the top response by most of the developers. Many of them specifically mentioned building dynamic title tags, and not just hand coding each page.
Reference: Best Practices for Title Tags
- Canonical URL Tag
Multiple people mentioned the canonical URL tag which I found very exciting. In the SEO world we all got super giddy when this tag came out, and it's great to know that it has surfaced as an important feature for developers as well.
Reference: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
- Permalinks
Get your URLs right! I built dynamic URLs for years that were not user friendly at all. There are so many options to rewrite and redirect your URLs, and many CMS's are getting more and more SEO savvy.
Reference: Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs - The Best Practice for SEO is Still Clear
- Robots.txt
Although the robots.txt file is there to help a site owner make sure that the right areas are being crawled, if it set up incorrectly it could do more damage than it's worth. The theme from the developers was to make sure that you don't have "Disallow: /" or are in some way blocking access to relevant areas of the site.
Reference: Managing Robot’s Access To Your Website - From janeandrobot.com
- Image Alt Attribute
For me, this should actually be moved further up the list. This is a big one, as we've been talking about lately that keyword rich (not spammy) image alt attributes correlate with higher rankings. Now before you go and get all huffy, puffy about this one, watch the Whiteboard Friday about Correlation, Causation and SEO.
Also worth noting, but didn't make the top 5 list, were dynamic meta tags, internal linking, valid X(HTML), URL Hierarchy and fixing bad navigation.
A Few Noteworthy Quotes
There were a few responses that I received that I wanted to call out specifically. Whether they were spot-on, a little "out there", or downright kooky, I felt they deserved their own recognition.Ken Jones - This is by far my favorite response, and OH SO TRUE!
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Cesar Serna - Cesar is well-known in the SEO industry, so I thought perhaps it would give me some street cred if I posted his well versed quote which I received via IM (see how cool I am!!). :)
"From a developers point of view implementing Canonical Tags is the simplest website update for SEO impact. It's one line of code and yet it signals to engines what your preferred indexed URL should be instead of leaving it up to search engines to decide algorithmically."Actually, I completely agree with his response as long as we can prove that the Canonical URL Tag is really working. I've seen it work well on some large client sites, but have also heard about people running into various issues with it.
Ben Hendrickson - Ben really needs no introduction, and all I can say is "yea... what he said"
"At the beginning of Anna Karenina the observation was made that happy households are all alike, but unhappy households are all unhappy in unique ways. The same, I suggest, is true for SEO. Whatever is screwing up the SEO of a site ought to be fixed. But although most sites are doing something wrong, there isn't any single thing that most sites are doing wrong.See, this is the caliber of developer we have here at SEOmoz. Booyah!
That said, there are things more commonly wrong, although listing them looks a bit like a list of SEO best practices that you are very aware of.
- URL hierarchy. Frequently URLs will derive from the structure of one's code or CMS, and this will be different than is optimal for users and search engines. Fixing this is sometimes best done with another layer of abstraction like mod-rewrite.
- Lack of a one-to-one mapping between urls and pages (e.g. canonicalization issues).
- Uncrawlable ajax content.
- Bad site navigation links.
- Title tags that do not reflect each pages' content, and so on down the list of usual suspects."
Mel Gray - Mel is another of our "wicked smart" SEOmoz developers.
"Two words: "pop ups" People LOVE pop ups.See our staff would never give in to 2nd place!
But seriously... I have a site that was ranking number 2 for a particular internet meme. I put 0 effort into developing it. I just would upload images from time to time. But it still bugged me that I lagged behind this site. I changed the title tag and added a brief meta description with keywords for the meme (no stuffing) and as soon as the SERPs started reflecting the change, I was #1."
Jason Swihart - Actually Jason's original response was "Develop good content." which I pushed him on a bit asking whether that was really a developer's role. This prompted his final response:
By the way, Jason used to be my boss many eons ago when I was doing mainly ColdFusion development.
As many mentioned in the YOUmoz conversation, it's essential for Developers and SEOs to work together. Really. We need each other. Developers usually love to learn, so if there's something they don't know or understand, educate them. But remember that educating them may mean to point them in the right direction and let them figure it out on their own. Challenges keep those analytical minds working!
How do you work with your developers? Have you found a certain technique or method for working together productively? I'd love to hear your take on this list and whether you feel these changes really are the most impactful with the lowest level of effort. How about the developers out there. Do you feel you were aptly represented? What steps do you take to work effectively?
Photo Attribution:
I think it's easy for us as consultants (whatever our specialty) to sometimes forget that not all advice is equal when it comes to implementation. Doesn't mean we shouldn't give our best advice, but I think it can be a huge help to understand the demands on developers (and, ultimately, on the client's time and budget) and try to lead with high-impact changes that are the easiest to implement. Why not take the win-wins when you can?
alt tags alt tags alt tags...I would refuse to hire a developer who referred to an alt attribute as an alt tag. Shame that the author seeks to measure/credit the SEO knowledge of developers and steps on this land-mine...
Now that's pedantic... but true.
Yes, it's my personality flaw. Years of auditing means an abnormal fixation on the small, mostly insignificant errors.
I often find the small errors to be among the most important and truly critical to fix.
Touche! Silly mistake that I make all the time. Why does "alt tag" just roll off the tongue so nicely?? :) I have updated the post, I'd hate to leave it inaccurate! Thanks for the reminder.
To be honest, I'm a developer.. and I only started using the term "alt tags" after speaking with SEOs for several years. It was just easier than correcting them every time. ;)
Nathan Buggia who runs the Bing Webmaster Central program presented a fantastic slidedeck for techies at the Mix '08 conference, called "Advanced SEO for Developers".
There's the audio as well as the powerpoint of his presentation here.
My fav tip for high impact/low effort SEO?
Find a developer to champion SEO. He/she will help get SEO best practices more readily accepted and implemented. Especially for large organizations where you may be one SEO for many devs, this is by far the most scaleable task you can accomplish!
I agree 100% on this. In fact I was the developer to champion SEO, which eventually lead me to doing more and more SEO.
A great developer is like a great tailor.
Years ago I worked in a men's store selling suits and all the related. We had a tailor on site named Ko, who was originally from Korea and actually spoke minimal (to less than minimal English).
Every now and then there would be a particularly challenging tailoring need...a fix or adjustment to a suit or trousers, and Ko would respond, "No, no. No can do."
Sometimes I knew it wasn't possible, and perhaps this was to appease a customer who wouldn't accept that their favorite whatever was beyond saving or yes, they really did put on enough weight that they needed to buy a new one. But if I thought that there might still be hope, I might "accidentally" leave it behind.
More times than not, when I went back to get the piece later that day, Ko managed to do whatever it was that needed to be done, even though it originally was a "no do."
Great developers are like Ko and other great tailors...they are driven and rise to challenges. Sometimes you have to fuel the fire..."well, if it can't be done, it can't be done...I just figured if anyone could do it, you could. But I guess it can't be done."
Always give your developer the opportunity to rise to a challenge and amaze you.
LOL - If I were a Korean tailor, that would be me. Must be the developer in me - I'm notorious for grumbling and telling clients it can't be done and then showing up the next day with the finished product :)
It's easy to stereotype certain niches, but there are definitely some personality differences (as a group) between designers, coders, and marketers. Sometimes, we all have to learn to speak each other's language and decode those secret messages.
hey its better to over deliver than dissapoint right? i'm going to make a habit of doing this from now..."no, it is impossible...it can't be done!" then I'll come with a finished product ;]
It's the Scotty approach - you say "It cannot be done, Captain!" and then go work your magic and tweak out another 0.5 on the warp factor so that you can escape just in time later in the episode :)
First of all, thanks for the shout. I'm glad to see that my first little YOUmoz post has provoked such a discussion.
It's interesting that you got very different results from twitter than I did from my community. Admittedly, my community may be a lot more parochial (although it's a local list and I do live in Europe's equivalent of Silicon Vallery - it gets called Silicon Fen, but not very seriously).
I should also point out that I wasn't trying to be down on developers. I'm a developer myself (although these days I only work on one project, a very SEO friendly CMS). The initial reaction I got did very much surprise me, as I expected most developers to have moved on from the kind of attitudes I found.
I agree absolutely that it's vital for developers and SEO to work together well (and, like jeenita, I can say that from both sides of the fence).
The best piece of advice I read about working with developers recently (on https://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/getting-the-best-out-of-a-programmer/) was to give them problems to solve rather than solutions on a plate.
Yes yes yes! Let them figure the problem out. Sometimes they can be pointed in the right direction, but definitely let them come up with the ideas.
I used to ask our developers to implement SEO items we had discussed on their personal websites so they could see the impact. Once they saw an increase in ranking, they were usually quickly on board in the work environment as well. :)
Hmm and I hope I didn't come across that your post was down on developers, definitely not. It was an excellent discussion which provoked me to investigate further. You are right though, it could very well be the types of developers we know/work with which caused the difference in opinions.
Thanks. Getting people to test the changes on their own personal sites is a great tip.
I totally agree with you.
Infact it's the same thing I suggest to the devs I work with. All of them have a personal blog or website... for instance when it came the canonical rel, I explained them the meaning and use and to experiment with it in their websites. After a few weeks they started seeing the good effects on their rankings.
But, on the other side, if they propose a SEO solution they insist it could be good to use, again I tell them to experiment with their webs... usually that solution gives more problems than success. For a dev learning from errors it's also a big way to really learn.
Ciao
As a developer I totally agree.
How about this for a challenge: try to get all of the pages in your site crawlable from the homepage with the least number of clicks (click-depth) and with a maximum of 100 links per page (only show them Rand's WBF if they get totally stuck).
If you can get a developer to do this then it will help with crawlability and the flow of link juice through your site.
That would be a fun challenge! Great idea. :)
An interesting angle I hadn't connsidered ..."give them problems to solve rather than solutions on a plate"...we always try our best to be collaborative but this approach may well have merit. Thanks for the stimulus...
Every SEO keeps praising the canonical tag. It works, but not as well as it could.
We have 37+ market based subdomains. Each market creates their own unique content but we also produce some "national" content that is available for them to use if they choose.
We use the canonical tag on national content to specify a market that should be seen as the content originator. This is an amazing resolution to a potential duplicate content issue right? Well not exactly, since Google only uses the tag as a suggestion, it tends to be hit or miss. After much tracking and evaluation, Google still seems to rely more heavily on internal linking.
Fortunately, our URLs are canonicalized already and don’t have to worry about tracking tags, or other DUST issues. I would imagine that the canonical tag works better for these situations.
So it’s cool, but not that cool.
I've dealt with many more "Web masters" than I have web developers in my few years of working as dedicated SEO.
The outdated term webmaster (the term still gives me the shivers) implies the position is filled by an all-knowing, all-problem-solving master - someone able to do it all - "NO WE DON'T NEED AN SEO, I CAN DO IT I CAN DO IT, I'LL SHOW YOU!". Uh huh.
Many of the real developers I've come into contact with understand the notion of specialization and the fact that there are many areas of web development that require a dedicated and ongoing effort in order to stay competitive. This is not to say that I haven't met more than a few decent web developers with typical levels of skepticism/suspicion (and justifiably so, with all the snake oil salesmen out there). Nevertheless, after some exposure to what the white hat sector of our industry offers, the more forward thinking devs I've come into contact with have gained a better understanding of the amount of knowledge and experience a competent SEO offers.
i solve that problem by being both the seo guy and developer :)
my clients are not having much joy with the canonical... it is very unreliable. What's a guy to do when you're trying to play by the rules?
I completely agree with your last statement "What's a guy to do when you're trying to play by the rules?"
In my post below I discuss the use of the cannonical tag across subdomains for shared content. We're honestly trying to help Google keep its index clean and yet it tends to ignore our suggetions via the cannonical tag.
This is the downside of not having actual 'rules' to follow, only recommendations.
that was a great read. i work for a big company and work side by side with a developer and sometimes it can be pretty frustrating to explain to him why i make the suggestions that i do.
to alot of developers in my experience, SEO is unheard of. I've had developers ask me if my job is to refresh our website all day!
you gotta keep in mind that while you're trying to do your job as a SEO, they're tryign to do their job as a developer. What they think is a great idea might be the worst idea in a SEO's mind.
I agree with the high ROI with alt tags and love developers who understand and use these tags properly.
I'm seeing a steady decline in the amount of "divider" or "spacer" alt tags, which were always very frustrating and a pain to remove/edit site-wide.
Sounds like these developers have a decent understanding on SEO.
Seems like I always run into the developers who seem to think that since you can style anything to look anyway you want with CSS, then all markup has no value. Everything could be a <span> tag.
Its been so unbelievable frustating.
Or I meet the developer who thinks that Google is wrong when the site is having problems getting indexed. It could never be their code or a problem with the CMS...no never.
I've worked with some champs and sadly I've worked with some chumps.
great post, Im lucky to be working in an environment where we have about 20 rockstar developers, along with a few megastars.
after a period of a few months where I did get a few rolled eyes, solutions to "issues" are often suggested back to me from them, really good guys!
MOGmartin
I too am looking forward to when we get more consistent support for the canonical URL tag across all engines.
They've made their commitment to support it - but there still seems to be a ways to go to see it work as promised in practice.
Baby steps, baby steps...
Great post. I just had to send it to the development team. Lets see if the sparks fly !!!!
*waves to dev team* Hi!
The result of the email was fantastic. "We keep you in a job don't we!!!". Fair point Im the SEO manager but they do the back end stuff for me !
I expected a little more of a bite to be fair.
Its all fun and games.
Sorry peeps, I have two accounts. One for work and one personal one. The above comment is from GoogleConsultant
This is all great info. But difficult for the average marketer to keep up on. Granted yes SEOMOZ is awesome and totally rocks. In addition, it is useful to have some help in constructing the content in the first place. I just did a demo on the new Sitecore OMS before we had a guest blog posted on Oshyn's blog. We used our own website in the demo...and I was amazed at what the CMS showed me to do to improve SEO. Don't you think this should become the industry standard? Tell me what you think: https://www.oshyn.com/_blog/Sitecore/post/The_Next_Evolution_of_Web_Content_Management_Technologies/
Great article about SEO and how to optimize its usage for a number of clients!
Great Job!
Great read there (first reply for a few months go me)!!!
I work extremely closely with my developers, I try to understand where they are coming from and vice versa. At the end of the day our jobs should have a business objective in mind, which at some point will have a bottom line.
Working together toward that common goal is what the aim should always be. Rather than creating a "them and us" scenario, instead its just US!
Besides I have had enough arguments with brand managers over the years who want to sacrifice keywords for brand terms, especially when their brand isn't a big player! But that's a whole different conversation.
Developers are great individuals who come up with some awesome ideas, I try and ensure our ideas have some if not a lot of SEO focus and I am there to ask the questions and assist in finding a way. If it benefits both ours and our customers businesses then its win win as far as I am concerned.
Thanks! I'm glad this brought you out from behind the scenes and got you to comment. :) It's definitely a benefit for everyone to work together on projects.
The topic of working with brand managers is an interesting one. But really an SEO often has to work with not only developers and brand managers, but project managers, product managers, business analysts, quality assurance engineers, etc. We often only talk about the relationship between the developer and the SEO but it would be interesting to discuss the full web lifecycle.
Hey! Yep didn't even think about all those guys!
Often at times I have felt myself becoming a mediator first and an SEO second!
It isn't just as simple as optimizing a website, it's a case of balancing everyone's thoughts as well as aiming for the business objective!
Thanks Jennita.
I was just thinking about the importance of the relationship with my web dev. when you wrote this blog, thanks. Sounds like the optimal solution is for search engine specialists to know programming and programmers to know SEO.
Sounds like you gotta good Developers!
I'm a developer first, but I also have a very keen interest in SEO. Whenever possible I try to keep up to date with whatever's considered best practise. I also work closely with a designer who has good awareness of SEO, and between us we're more effective than some SEO "consultants" I've met over the years.
As an aside. something I often recommend is building a dynamic XML sitemap using data from the database, which curiously is a trick than many people (developers and SEOs alike) seem to miss.
Interesting, that seems like a no brainer. Update the XML sitemap hourly, daily, weekly, whatever works for your site!
For huge sites, yeah, it's definitely a good idea! A lot of CMS systems these days have plugins to handle auto-generating sitemaps.
Love the drawings...
Thanks! I thought it was appropriate, but I can't take credit for it. I found it off flickr, the photo credit is at the end of the post. :D
SEO is becoming more and more popular today, many businesses who want a site or already have a site tend to ask about it and want to know if it can make them more money.The top five changes I agree, they are very effective for a developer. I'm not familiar with all five but I will do my research so I can stay up to date with whats going on with the subject of SEO.
Ultimately, being able to share what we know as SEOs is the quickest path to developer compliance. They're a proud group and can often be standoffish until they see how SEO can bring their websites to the larger masses.
Building and fostering a great relationship with developers and showing SEO results based on implemented tactics is the path of least resistance. That said, great list, Jennita.
That may be true for old school developers but all the young pups in the field don't seem standoffish as you said.
Any friend or young person I interact with that is a developer/coder/ etc. is typically all ears to my SEO suggestions and usually get researching for themselves.
I quote Archie from RockNRolla -
"They ain't no respecters of the old school" =)
That's good! I hate to know though what you consider an "old school developer." I'm pretty sure I fall into that clique.
Dynamic page titles are low-effort, but I wouldn't consider it high impact or best practice. If you have a large website with hundreds or thousands of pages and have the manpower then I would always opt for manual (hand-optimized) page titles. However, if you have a large website but do not have the manpower then the impact vs. the time and effort does not equal the desired result therefore it would probably not be feasible to have manually create page titles (or only manually create page titles for your most important pages). But if the site is small or less than one hundred pages then there is no reason to dynamically create the page titles when you can optimize these yourself and get more rewarding results.
Most dynamic page titles are keyword rich which help rankings, but poorly written which decreases click through rate. In some instances you'll find very good dynamically created page titles, but I think it is important to manually create and have a set of eyes managing page titles, if it makes feasible sense.
I agree with the high impact/low effort of the image alt tags. After reading this post from Danny D. I did some testing of my own and have seen amazing results. Alternate text definitely has some esteem.
Don't forget that this information came directly from developers. I agree that personal title tags are necessary for small to medium sites but if you have a site with hundreds of thousands of pages, it's practically impossible to hand-optimize every page. Dynamic title tags done well (with rules around them) can most definitely be high impact. Although I do always prefer to have a default set, with the ability to manually change it if needed.
I would strongly advise against pushing the canonical url tag on poor developers! The support from the big 3 search engines is sketchy and even Google who is supposed to be the most evangelical of the 3 for this tag don't seem to do very well with it (check out Dave Naylors blog to hear a true horror story).
Much better to "fix" canonical issues by use of robots.txt and redirections and having nicely constructed permalinks that are linked to.
Where I work there is a healthy respect between the developers and the seos. Both groups are very aware of the importance of each others skills but there is also a healthy distance between our responsibilities and what actually interests us professionally.
I am therefore always very suspicious of people who have the self styled job title of Web Developer/SEO! (I have seen it!)
I agree! Don't forget this list actually came directly from developers. :) The canonical tag shouldn't be used as a band-aid to cover up your poor architecture. But it can be helpful for certain instances. We've actually seen it work quite well for some clients.
Both developers and SEOs have a lot of information they need to stay up-to-date with. It is difficult for one person to truly be both. I used to be a developer myself and am glad to have the technical background. However it's hard enough to keep up with new trends and changes in SEO, that it's highly improbable for me to continue to be a great developer at the same time.
(edited because after all these years I still can't spell truly :)
Be suspicious of me then. I'm actually the Tech Lead and In-house SEO for my site. Having good understanding of SEO and then being able to implement it means changes can happen very fast and be right the first time.
Having a developer on the team with SEO expertise also means that there is always someone with an SEO hat on (white of course) when it comes to code reviews (great cartoon BTW Jennita).
@Stephen, I am suspicious, but more for your secret service/men-in-black/Whitney Houston bodyguard avatar than you job title:-P
@James glad you got the irony, although I'm not sure how much I look like Kevin Costner. Maybe a bit more like Whitney after a night on the pills.
Stephen,
I also consider myself the "Web Developer/SEO" and it came from a need for seo friendly development on a start-up company budget. Hence, I started studying and working on both aspects of our website. Having both skillsets (IMHO) is one of the things I am most proud of ... and something I emphasize.
I really think developers will eventually all need to be good at SEO on a coding level. They may not be the ones who work on the off-site factors of SEO such as link building, but the demand for websites that are SEO friendly out of the box is still growing.
Well for me personally as a freelancer dealing with mostly small business websites I have to know about all the on-page factors as the site owners usually consider me the one-stop-shop for all things web-related, and I'd think it would be the same for others in my situation.
You're not the only one in that situation, John. I am as well, as are many others. (Off-Topic. Haven't seen you around SitePoint lately; work keeping you that busy?)
One more in your boat.
I work at a small marketing company. Originally hired as a web designer/developer, I've had to (very quickly) become an expert on SEO as well.
I have to admit, it would be nice to have the expertise of a full-featured SEO to add to the pot. As much as I read about SEO, it still feels like I'm missing something.
Great post, I love the image in the article lol.
Imo, developers are the backbones of an IT company. Perhaps sometimes SEOers and developers dont understand each other, so they should definitely communicate more frequently.
The most annoying things about developers are the ones that have made a custom CMS system for a site that's locked down and a pain to change anything. That's my biggest problem with Web Dev's is when you cannot even touch the raw files.
Don't get me wrong, worked with some amazing guys in-house and consultancy, learnt a lot about servers and how to watch out for various hack attacks through them :)
Great post. I wanted to follow the link to Managing Robot’s Access To Your Website but it is broken.
Sorry about that - should be fixed now.
Thanks for fixing the link Pete! That is by far my favorite resource on the web for understanding the robots.txt and other protocols.
So it sounds like SEO should be left in the hands of developers rather than be a part of the marketing department...is that what most people think? What do you think Jennita? (awesome post btw)
First of all I love your avatar Frank, it really does look like you! :P
No, I don't think SEO should be left in the hands of the developers solely. At least not necessarily. There are definitely some cases where the company is small and resources are limited and people have to take on different roles.
But a perfect scenario, at least in my mind, would be a team of developers who are SEO savvy, plus an SEO team who are tech savvy. That combination brings the best of both worlds and an unbeatable team.