The million dollar question is how to get good rankings for good keywords without having to spend too much money. This article does a good job describing how to keep a successful site optimized but actually getting the rankings is not covered much.<p><i>Never, ever, let marketers send newsletters and promotional e-mails from the same IPs that the websites are hosted on. A rogue employee who violates the CAN-SPAM act may result in the entire website being blacklisted.</i><p>But the problem is all someone needs to do is just get the IP for the website from the email link and blacklist that too, so a different IP will not help much. The best solution for blacklisting is cloud hosting which has many IPs , so the odds of all being blacklisted are slim. Amazon s3 servers have like 100+ ips
Another one is 'use the correct status codes for page requests'. Seen far too many sites returna 200 OK status for a non existent page, which may cause havoc with search engines indexing 404 messages and what not.<p>Oh, and make sure you actually use heading tags properly. God, so many sites and apps seem to be designed with no thought put into heading structure, with random h2s and h3s strewn about at random. Especially don't forget the h1 tag, and try and make sure it (and the title tag for the page) are both unique on every page.<p>Basic I know, but come on. Too many SPAs seem to be built with no thought put into even the basics of HTML structure or on page SEO.
A brisk but thorough checklist that fulfills the promise of the title.<p>My only objection would be this bit (below). Specifically, "demands." How many engineers are in a positiin to demand anything? The truth is, for the most part, it's not engineers who are ruining the internet with bloat and privacy infringements. It's designers and marketing. They're more likely to forget the end user and opt for so nasty excess.<p>> "Demand that someone take ownership of each tracking pixel and tag that's added to a page, then, make these stakeholders justify their tags every six months. If you don't, people will ask you to add junk to the page until your team gets blamed for a slow site."
> Never, ever, let marketers send newsletters and promotional e-mails from the same IPs that the websites are hosted on. A rogue employee who violates the CAN-SPAM act may result in the entire website being blacklisted.<p>Can someone expand on that one? The blacklist would only apply to the IP address being sent from and not the domain?
Why does the name 'Web Engineer' bother me in this context? It had taken me a while just getting used to software engineer, even having a degree. Software dev, especially application building is mostly combining pre-built libraries. A web engineer is someone I would think drafted and refined the protocols and technologies used by app devs. Anyone else have thoughts on this? Is engineer == dev, STEM == STE*M now? UX engineer, marketing/growth engineer?
The interesting one for me was measuring error rates (if your JS heavy web page calls the server 100 times, if two users try to load and one gets 500 that should be 50% error rate but it looks like <1%<p>So it feels like a piece of JS that says I have seen everything that should load load ok, then reports home with the page seems a good idea.<p>Probably quite doable - can JS see the network load like web developer tools ?
>A bot in Russia isn't automatically bad and a bot in the United States isn't automatically good. Plenty of bad actors deploy bots from within Amazon's U.S.-based AWS servers.<p>"Checked his post history. Russian bot confirmed."
Don't waste your time reading this article, it just mentions random points about how to have a functional web app, plus in a perfect world SEO should not exist, it's the Search Engine's job to find the content and show the user the content he is looking for, not the developers. I shouldn't have to add "hacks" in my code for the Google Crawler to understand my site the same way users already do.
I'm hoping my free SEO monitoring app in Cloudflare can at least help with the technical dirty work. It is powered by the Cloudflare Workers platform which allows for quick fixing from within the app <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ranksense" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/ranksense</a>
Solid list overall.<p>"Consider using the "304-Not Modified" response code on large websites with lots of pages that don't change very often."<p>This is the only thing that, from an SEO perspective, I'd challenge. I can't even begin to see where the supposed benefit of this would be.
> A complex web page might call the server 150 times as it loads to completion.<p>That irked me a little. I'm assuming this includes fonts & images (not a bunch of ajax requests), but it still seems high.
SEO is extremely simple. This is all you need to know to rank top page on Google: Get lots of backlinks from sites with good Google ranking to blog articles on your site about the subject you want to rank for.<p>In other words, publish content people want to link to, and get big players to link to it.<p>That’s it. Other SEO advice is usually a distraction or snake oil.
there is no such thing as "SEO". Also, everything on the list has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization.<p>For example "SERVER STABILITY AND DOWNTIME".<p>How come taking case of your server stability is SEO???