What Software Engineers Need To Know About SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great tool to reach web users and convert them into new customers. Companies that better understand these best practices can exploit SEO in different ways for audience expansion. Quite often, businesses look to SEO experts for this task. But if you’re the software engineer in charge of a company’s domains, they may call on you for assistance. Here are some vital things software engineers need to know about SEO.

Focus on the audience, not the keywords.

Many people think SEO simply involves stuffing keyword results and posting links in a blog post to attract new visitors. While the use of SEO keywords is the norm, there’s more scrutiny involved if you’re a software engineer. At the core of SEO is the use of Google targeting to ramp up website credibility and ensure conversions.

Google audience targeting allows you to show your Adwords or Google Display Network ads to people based on demographic targeting. This means you can tailor your ads based on demographics such as gender, age, marital status, education level, parental status, and more. You can even build a client’s website around people with similar interests in a specific topic or even cater to a specific web browser.

Suppose you work for a group of tech companies that specialize in creating Android apps. Google targeting makes it easier to focus on Chrome users instead of Safari and other browsers, which may not work well for your clients’ needs. As a software engineer, focusing on the audience opens you to the needed resources to meet your website’s key performance indicators.

Keep code clean and easy to revise.

The SEO space keeps evolving daily. The more you discover hacks to help you reach your campaign goal, the more you’ll have to make tweaks to your codes. Software engineers who keep clean code environments will have a more manageable process in implementing code changes. Regardless of whether you’re using the np.append method in Python or another coding language, codes should always be kept clean.

Ensure the site is crawlable.

Making sure your site is crawlable hinges on two main factors: discoverability and indexation. Using clean and optimized URLs is a great way to allow robots to skim your website for the relevant content web users need. For a search giant like Google to crawl your website, the structure and words in your URL also matter. Keeping the URL short and descriptive with hyphens instead of underscores can improve readability.

Don’t forget to create a sitemap.

Internal linking helps crawler bots to communicate efficiently with your website. However, things can become a little difficult for large sites with massive browsing data. Adding a site map to your site provides clues for bots to follow during the indexing process.

Sitemaps also provide information like when a page was last updated on your site and whether your site favors alternative languages. All these factors count when ranking sites according to their relevance.

Optimize the site for mobile devices.

Recently, Google released a mobile search engine algorithm with a new ranking signal. The creation of responsive websites that are fast loading and easy to use on all types of devices is a must. Mobile-friendliness has become a priority for most website managers. This isn’t surprising knowing that about 92 percent of the world’s internet population use their mobile phones for daily activities on the web. Software engineers can create simple mobile versions for clients to leverage the numerous mobile opportunities available today. It’s also helpful to check Google Analytics or any other analytics platform you use for comprehensive reports on your site’s mobile-friendliness.