Episode 11 - Studies in Search Engine Optimization: 13 Essential Practices for Developers (Part 2 of 2)

42 mins

2020-05-09 engineering seo

Finishing up on our previous episode on search engine optimization, this time we discuss specific things that you can do as a developer building a website to improve your rankings and discoverability.

What can I do as a Developer?

Developers must learn about SEO so they can design for it. A few small tweaks early on can make it easy to integrate with organizations responsible for content updates.
Using the <picture> tag instead of <img> for loading images of the optimal size that provide a fallback.
Single-page web apps aren’t easy to crawl and may have lower SEO.
Using more modern image compression formats like webp and its implications.
Optimizing load times with preconnect and preload parameters inside <link> tags.
Minimizing and combining scripts and style sheets for more speed boosts.
More load time improvements with browser caching and time-to-live.
How service workers and Progressive Web Applications can help with caching.
Using AMP to improve the mobile experience.
Teaching the search engines about your content with <meta> tags that conform to OpenGraph and Twitter Card specifications.
Optimizing og:title and og:description properties in <meta> tags for search engine display.
Using <meta name="keywords">.
Describing your website with enough detail to generate search cards by using JSON-LD descriptors defined by schema.org.
Use canonical links for similar content and nofollow to dissociate your content from external links.
Use <meta name="robots"> to direct search engine crawlers.

References

Background music by Vendredi from Audio Library+

javascript html cdn caching json webp seo search lighthouse pagespeed amp pwa