10.14.10

What developers think about SEO

This started out as a list of techniques that developers can use to help your company's SEO efforts. After talking to a few developers I realized what them might be a more important place to start.

Developers generally don't like SEO - they don't like the messyness of it, the lack of clear cause and effect. Developers react to Rules of SEO the same way they react to Rules of Accounting - they seem arbitrary, inconsistent, and arcane.

Further, developers often don't like the fact that they see the quality of search results seemingly declining, at least on Google, and they have at least a vague notion that blackhat SEO practices are to blame. Hacker News [1] is full of comments critical of the way Demand Media generates content by hiring cheap freelancers to write poor articles for less than the expected adsense revenue for the resulting page.

There is a lot of irrational anger - The Hacker News thread references a wikihow article on pancakes[2] which is arguably well written, free of errors (other than that self-rising flower isn't really a substitute for at least some baking powder), and complete. What's so bad about building a business making these type of articles?

Technical people like clean, precise solutions to problems that are rooted in organic causes - humans trying to make money by optimally placing their products and services form an organism that is unpredictable and unmanageable.

I asked a number of people in the development community what their thoughts are on SEO. These are mostly Ruby on Rails developers doing web development for successful companies, some of which really survive on well optimized search results.

• * Overrated, and a moving target
• * I mean, if the content was so great wouldn't people link to it anyway?
• * Linkbuilding is a constant battle between cheaters and search engines

If you have a website that relies on organic search traffic, and you have software developers, you probably have employees who believe your backlink creation campaign to your fresh content is "cheating". So how to you motivate them?

Focus on Interesting Technical Problems

First, I focus on finding interesting technical problems to solve.

• How do you scrape google (a lot) without getting blocked?
• How do you build a distributed web index that you can update without building from scratch?
• How do you store the nodes in the backlink graph and traverse it quickly?

Focus on Interesting Technology

Next, I spend a lot of time talking about the technology we use to solve those problems.

• Erlang (and Riak) for data storage
• Resque and Riak for queuing
• BERT-RPC for communication

Be honest about the industry and your role in it.

There are a lot of 'cheaters' out there. We talk honestly about the good guys and the bad guys in the SEO space. I'm committed to not being one of them and I communicate that to the team. Developers tend to be critical thinkers and can tell when you're committed to your principles.

However, I often remind them the search engines aren't interested in optimal search results as much as they believe. Search engines are interested in maximizing revenue per page - they're not the 'good guys' any more than any other business attempting to maximize revenue. Trying to influence those results when the search engines themselves are not pretending to be neutral in their display of particularly lucrative terms is not 'cheating'. They don't want you to know where you rank for purely economic reasons. In that sense, the good guys are anyone trying to reveal what the search engines don't want you to know.

It's one of the reasons I built inboxSEO.com - I wanted to bring more clarity into SEO for website owners, and be one of the 'good guys'.

I've learned is that developers are a lot more comfortable working on projects when they like the technology, so we perhaps tend to over-emphasize technology as a means of attracting and motivating top talent. Because we're using tools devs like to work on outside of the office, we get people experimenting in their free time, talking at Ruby meetups, and generally invested in the code we're building in a way they wouldn't be if we were using perl or PHP.

So what do we do to motivate developers who don't like SEO? Communicate Honestly, Focus on Interesting Technical Problems, and use Interesting Technology.

Chad DePue is the founder of Inaka Networks, a consulting firm focused on Rails, Erlang, and iOS development, through our team based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We recently released inboxSEO.com. We also perform SEO consulting and publishing through SEO.IO.