In this week’s podcast episode. Rebecca is joined by her good friend Carrie Dils.
The two spend the session chatting about the importance of freelancers understanding the nuances of SEO for developers.
Carrie and Rebecca have co-hosted two SEO Bootcamp workshops and Carrie also wrote four-part blog post series called 30 Days to Better SEO. Carrie utilizes her SEO knowledge and breaks it down into bite-size pieces for developers.
Highlights from Carrie and Rebecca’s Chat
- SEO is about content, but SEO is also about code.
- What developers don’t know about SEO can and will hurt their web development clients.
- Everything that is good for accessibility is also good for SEO.
- Developers need to understand SEO to better market themselves and to help their protect their clients.
- It’s important to think like a search engine when writing code and creating websites.
Carrie’s List of SEO Topics Developers Need to Know
- Schema and structured data
- Creating a clean code base
- Link structure and content silos
- Consistent permalink structures
- 301 redirects
- Mobile responsive design and coding
- Performance and speed optimization
- Tabbed content and how it can hamper SEO efforts
Carrie’s Advice for End Users Looking for an SEO Friendly Developer
- Ask potential developers about their approach to SEO
- Ask developers how they would weave SEO best practices into their development process
- Google the developers business name or personal name to see if they appear at the top of Google search
- Ask for references and review them thoroughly
- Review Github to see if code base is organized or a hot mess of babble
SEO Resources for Developers
- Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet from Moz
- SEO Checklist for Website Redesigns
- 301 Redirects
- Content Silos
- Tabbed SEO Content
- Google’s Mobile First Indexing
- Technical SEO
- To the Top SEO Course