How SEO Specialists and Web Developers Help Each Other Out

Only one search engine is the gold standard for web developers and site owners: Google. Each website (there are more than 2 billion out there) competes to earn a place on the first page – a space between the top ten of Google’s search results.

How does a website make it to the top?

The answer: SEO specialists and web developers make it happen. Both, they can do wonders for a website’s ranking. Separately, not so much. Let’s see why.

Web Developer & SEO Specialist Job Description

WEB developer	SEO Specialist
writes efficient, testable, well-documented code	analyzes and reviews websites how optimized they are for search engines
creates website layout or user interface	implements fixes and solutions for better optimisation
integrated data from back-end databases	designs on-page and off-page SEO strategy plan

Web Developer and SEO Specialist Job Facts

Two of the most popular and necessary online careers today are web developers and SEO specialists. Besides that, building websites is one of the highest-paid jobs online. Plus, SEO analysts steadily go up the scale of highest-paid online jobs. The reason? Simply put, their skill set helps e-businesses make lots of money.

And while both have completely different job descriptions, in today’s world they are as co-dependent as they will ever be. Frankly, you can’t have a website that is not optimized for search engines, and at the same time, you can’t work on optimization of the site if it is not built and functioning properly.

Online Popularity and Visibility

For business websites, the relationship between the two is of essential significance. Balance is the key. If not properly coordinated this team can cost the website organic traffic, leads, and conversions. Once this happens, the website has little to no future in the web world. Here is how a search engine expert can improve the site with their skills and practices and prompt better online visibility of the website.

On-Page SEO Practices That Improve the Sites’ Functionality

What makes an SEO expert a must is their skill to technically optimize the website. The main goal is to make the site recognizable to Google as relevant and authoritative and as a result, rank it higher, and ultimately make it more visible. Here follows a list with some of the most prominent activities they do.

1. Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

The expert optimizes page titles and meta descriptions making sure they contain the relevant keywords previously singled out. They add these keywords in the descriptions in a natural and reader-friendly context. According to Google, the recommended size of a page title is 50-60 characters, while a meta description is 155-160 characters. The search engine optimization analyst follows these trends and rules and implements them.

2. Optimize Page Content

It is important to know that page content must always be optimization-friendly. Google values and ranks higher the content if it is 100% unique, engaging, and easily understandable. Therefore, the specialist enriches the content with relevant keywords for ranking and produces content that both Google and potential buyers find useful.

3. Headings Formatting

The H-tags reveal crucial information in connection to the content that follows. Each page must have one H1 tag. As for the other headings –H2 and H3, the SEO expert is expected to produce easily understandable content, so that readers can easily skim the text and understand it.

4. Optimize Images

This is the part where the visitors are supposed to be visually engaged. The images are supposed to provide a pleasing visual experience, tell a story and keep the visitor informed and entertained. Be that as it may, Google doesn’t perceive images as people do. Here enters the search engine professional – they optimize the images so that Google can understand them. This is achieved with alt tag optimization. The alt tag details what’s in an image. Simply put, it transforms the image into words which Google can understand and value more. The title of the image is also important as it also has a descriptive nature that helps Google read the image.

5. Optimize URL

To reap the benefits of search engine optimization, the expert must optimize the URLs. This entails making the page URL less than 255 characters. Also, there must be hyphens to separate the different parts in order to make it comprehensible for both visitors and Google. To be Google-friendly, the URL is supposed to be descriptive but not too long– and naturally, it should contain the target keyword.

6. Building Internal Linking

The content on the website must be interlinked. This means pages should be connected through links placed in the content that holds the referring information. This practice keeps the reader on the website and lets Google know about the other pages. By internal linking to the most important pages on the site, the SEO search engine expert points Google directly to them, making these pages more visible and thus provide higher search space on Google.

7. Page Loading Speed

The time it takes to load a site is one of Google’s evaluating factors that has a significant impact on the ranking. By making it as fast as possible, the user experience is improved as website visitors don’t leave the site.

Other Tech Changes and Improvements

There are a lot more tech changes that need to be done on a website apart from the ones above, that are also important. They are:

• adding schema.org tags
• creating .xml and html sitemap
• creating robots.txt
• creating a canonical tag

The specialist makes sure these practices are implemented in the website’s structure. Hence, they improve the site’s functionality and readiness to be evaluated by Google.

How Web Developers Help SEO Specialists

Now, let’s take a look at the reasons why an SEO needs the skills of a web developer.

Advanced Knowledge of HTML

The web developer has advanced knowledge of HTML. The HTML is used to create the markup of a website (i.e. the structure) and when creating the developer makes sure that the HTML is as simple as possible. The SEO analyst probably lacks sufficient knowledge of HTML or understands it only at a basic level, so achieving a neat and simple structure might be a problem.

Specific Website Building Practices

The web developer has useful knowledge and points out how server locations impact geographic optimization. They also help diagnose server header codes and content indexation impediments (content being loaded via JavaScript, or how to mitigate duplicate content issues).

Mobile Responsiveness

According to suggestions made by Google, mobile responsiveness is a huge SEO ranking factor. From here, the web developer helps the SEO specialist understand how they applied responsive CSS styles in the mobile version. Also, they notify them whether this version is in a subfolder or subdomain.

During the past few years, it has become imperative to create CSS for mobile versions first and then, create the styles for bigger screens. This way, the “weight” of the CSS file for mobile is decreased. All this info will help the SEOs to become aware and direct their efforts in improving the website’s online visibility on smart devices.

Conclusion

All things considered, the bond between the SEO specialist and the web developer is a strong one, and the need for one another too. The former finds the issues that decrease the online visibility of a website, and the latter helps them solve those issues by implementing effective web development practices.

And vice versa. The web developer needs the skills and knowledge of SEO specialists to build a website fully optimized for achieving the ultimate user experience and, most importantly, a website that is easily found by search engines.

Working together, they are able to provide superior results to the client.