How to improve SEO with technical solution

17 August, 2023

Sometimes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) seems a bit far from technical stuff, and in many companies, SEO is in the marketing's scope. It makes sense, because today SEO doesn't only concern classic search engines, but also concerns social media like facebook, instagram, tik tok. However, in this article, I would like to raise the point to improve SEO with technical solutions by developers.

Before improvement: measure the impact

Before making any SEO improvement, it's a good idea to be able to measure it, or we will not know the effects from our actions. For example, we could track the incoming visits / new users / revenue / CVR coming from SEO channels.

Enforce the basic

Title, meta description, metaRobots, canonical, H1, hreflang... These SEO elements seem scattered and tiny, but playing them well could improve SEO to the next level.

1. title, meta description, H1:

They are quite important, but easily forgotten.

We could do something technically: instead of letting SEO analyst give a list of new titles and letting the developers update the HTML every time, we could create a system to automate the process and give the hand to SEO analyst to modify the title directly.

2. metaRobots and robot.txt: only index important pages

Since Link Juice and page rank are limited, we should allocate more resources to more important pages, and less resources to less important pages.

It's not a good idea to index all the pages, but only focus on important but limited pages, and to let Google give more attention to them.

3. Canonical and hreflang: for website with multiple country brand

For websites with multiple country brands (eg .com/.fr/.de), removing duplicate pages are important to help Google serve the website with the right brand.

Beyond the basic: JSON-LD based enriched search result

There are many fancy stuff to try on with Google, especially json-ld based enriched search result, for example, FAQ, Product... The idea of embedding JSON-LD in DOM is to have a better display in Google search results.

Game changer: web performance

Since initializing the notion of web vitals, web performance is more and more important for Google. Nowadays, web performance impacts the ranking in google search results.

As for web performance, I have written a small article about how to find ideas for web performance improvement.

Conclusion

SEO strategy could either be defensive (the basic elements, web performance) or offensive (new features like JsonLd or Abtest). SEO should be more than marketing, and developers should be able to contribute to it to improve SEO to the next level.

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