Technical SEO for Developers: A No-Nonsense Guide
As a developer, you've probably been handed SEO tasks that felt like busywork. "Add these meta tags." "Make the site faster." "Something something structured data."
The good news: most technical SEO is straightforward engineering problems. The bad news: you have to learn what the various pieces do. Here's the developer-friendly version.
The Mental Model
Think of technical SEO as an API documentation problem. Google is an automated system trying to understand your website. Your job is to make that understanding as easy as possible through clear, machine-readable signals.
Just like you'd write clear API docs for a human developer, you're writing "documentation" for Googlebot.
The Core Components
1. Meta tags (the HTTP headers of web pages)
Every web page should have certain meta tags in the <head> section:
<title>How to Make Sourdough Bread - Recipes Site</title>
<meta
name="description"
content="Step-by-step guide to making sourdough bread at home. Includes starter instructions and troubleshooting tips."
/>Think of these as the TL;DR for your page. The title appears in search results and browser tabs. The description appears as the snippet under the title.
For social sharing, you also need Open Graph tags (for Facebook/LinkedIn) and Twitter Cards:
<meta property="og:title" content="How to Make Sourdough Bread" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Step-by-step guide..." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/bread.jpg" />2. robots.txt (the .gitignore for search engines)
This file at your root domain tells crawlers what they can and can't access:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /api/
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
Mess this up and you might accidentally hide your entire site from Google. The syntax is unforgiving.
3. sitemap.xml (the API index)
A sitemap lists all the URLs you want indexed. It's like an index endpoint for your content:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/page1</loc>
<lastmod>2025-01-15</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>Most frameworks can generate this automatically.
4. Structured data (type annotations for content)
This is where you describe your content in a machine-readable format. Schema.org defines the vocabulary, and JSON-LD is the syntax:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"headline": "How to Make Sourdough Bread",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Jane Doe"
},
"datePublished": "2025-01-15"
}When Google understands your content structure, it can display rich results—star ratings for products, cooking times for recipes, answer boxes for FAQs.
Common Mistakes
Blocking JavaScript-rendered content. If your page content loads via JS after initial render, make sure Googlebot can execute that JavaScript. Test with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
Ignoring Core Web Vitals. Google measures page speed and responsiveness. Check PageSpeed Insights and fix the obvious issues (unused JavaScript, unoptimized images, layout shifts).
Canonical confusion. If the same content exists at multiple URLs (with and without www, HTTP vs HTTPS, trailing slashes), use canonical tags to tell Google which version is authoritative.
Missing alt text. Screen readers and search engines both use alt attributes to understand images. Don't leave them blank.
The Developer Toolkit
You don't need to memorize syntax for any of this. Use tools to generate the code:
- Meta tag generators spit out properly formatted meta and Open Graph tags
- robots.txt generators help you create valid rules without typos
- Schema generators let you fill in forms and get valid JSON-LD
The point isn't to become an SEO expert. It's to handle the technical pieces quickly so you can get back to building features.
Ready to try it yourself?
Put what you've learned into practice with our free online tool.
Generate Schema Markup