SEO technical concepts

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of enhancing a website’s traffic by increasing its visibility (a.k.a impressions) on search engine results pages (SERP).

Constant optimizations on the content, site performance, usability, and link profile significantly improve your website’s search engine visibility.

No matter how excellent an online service is, it won’t pay off until you offer it to the right audience. 

A website listed on the 10th page of search results won’t stand a chance against its better-positioned competitors.

As a web developer, you might not need to worry about SEO if you have an SEO expert (or experts) in the team. However, knowing the basics, especially the technical SEO, will help you create more SEO-friendly systems right from the beginning.

In technical SEO, micro-adjustments make a difference when they all come together; Page load speed (performance), page responsiveness, page structure fall under technical SEO.

To evaluate a website’s technical health, you can use site audit tools such as PageSpeed Insights by Google, Lighthouse in Google Chrome’s Devtools, GTMetrix, and SEMRush.

These tools audit your site and tell you what’s already good, what could be better, and what has to be fixed.

Here’s an example of Google’s PageSpeed Insight evaluating a site’s performance for mobile users:

To be good at technical SEO, you need to learn about website performance.

To be good at technical SEO, you need to learn about website performance.

The first step is to know the performance metrics that have an impact on your website’s ranking.

Metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), First Input Delay (FID), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the most important metrics when it comes to performance – as you can see in the above screenshot.

FID, LCP, and CLS are known as Core Web Vitals. 

CWV is becoming an official ranking factor by Google.

Reza Lavarian Hey 👋 I'm a software engineer, an author, and an open-source contributor. I enjoy helping people (including myself) decode the complex side of technology. I share my findings on Twitter: @rezalavarian