Does a programmer need to know SEO? What do you need to know as a Frontend Dev? Will this knowledge make your work easier?
You, as the developer responsible for building and maintaining the website, are partially responsible for good SEO practices.
You can leave the essence to the SEO experts, but as the person responsible for developing the application and the internet, there are a few things you should know.
Development and optimization for SEO are important and every client emphasizes it. Search engines are getting smarter by the day. Therefore, you need to have at least basic knowledge of SEO.
Loading time
One of the most important factors - is the speed of the website or application. The search engine wants to show the user a fast page. Nobody has time today, everyone is in a hurry. If you optimize the code and content on the website, everything will be ok. Google measures the bounce rate. If your website loads 4s, the bounce rate is 24%. Above 6s, the bounce rate is 50%! This means that every second person leaves. This tells Google that the website is of no value in itself. As a result, the power ranking in SERPs drops.
How to speed up a website written in JavaScript?
Minify JS Deferring JS Smaller payloads
The slow side gives a worse UX.
File for robots
The robots.txt file tells the robots how to index the different parts and subpages of the application/page. This small amount of code can make a big difference. If you specify in this file that the bot cannot add the page to the index, it will not be indexed. Consequently, it will not appear in search results. During development, you can disable indexing in the robots.txt file. This file indicates the URL addresses to be accessed by robots and crawlers.
Document structure
The thing with semantic HTML is that we use it to make products available. If you build your site with a div then it might look good, but it's neither meaningful nor accessible. By using non-semantic tags you are ruining the SEO and accessibility of your website. The browser doesn't know what each section of the document represents. Using semantic tags helps the browser understand the importance of the document, so it can use it to improve SEO.
Media type
HTML5 includes several tags that identify the type of media displayed in the document. 3 tags - audio, video, picture.
These tags assign semantic meaning to the content and signal the browser to queue a specific resource, such as a video playback engine.
Metadata
The metadata on static pages is fairly easy to set up. In SPA applications, bots and people don't get many static HTML pages. Therefore, when creating a SPA in popular frameworks, you must take into account the router views. For example, the Vue-meta package in Vue.js can handle meta tag changes when navigating between router views.
Clean code
I go back to the beginning again. As a Developer, you can create many amazing and complicated things. The user appreciates the convenience! Everyone cares about quick access to information. Lots of code, fountains, thousands of libraries? Will it improve UX for the user? Keeping your code clean is one of the most important SEO steps for a developer.
Summary
SEO doesn't have to be complicated. With the basics, you can make better decisions, which can have a significant impact on your business success.