Technical SEO for Developers: The Parts That Are Actually Your Job
Content and backlinks are the marketing team's problem. Crawlability, structured data, canonicals and page speed are yours — and they are the parts most sites get wrong.
Every developer has been handed an "SEO task list" that was really a content brief. The technical half is genuinely ours, and it is the half that silently stops a good site from ranking at all.
One H1, Semantic Everything Else
One <h1> per page describing that page. Headings in order. <nav>, <main>, <article>, <footer> used for what they mean. This is not pedantry — it is how a crawler builds an outline of your page.
Unique Title and Description Per Page
Every page needs its own. A site where forty pages share one meta description is telling Google those pages are interchangeable.
Canonical Tags on Everything
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/my-post">Without it, ?utm_source= and ?page=1 variants compete with the real URL and split its ranking signal.
Structured Data That Matches the Page
JSON-LD is the format Google prefers. An Article on a blog post, BreadcrumbList on nested pages, Person or Organization site-wide.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BlogPosting",
"headline":"...","datePublished":"2026-01-19T09:00:00Z"}
</script>Validate it in Google's Rich Results Test. Invalid structured data is worse than none — it gets ignored and can trigger a manual action if it misrepresents the page.
A Real Sitemap, Generated Not Hand-Written
Generate it from your database so new content appears automatically, and reference it from robots.txt. A stale hand-maintained sitemap is a liability.
noindex the Pages That Should Not Compete
Paginated archives, search result pages, filtered views. They dilute your index and rarely rank for anything useful.
Redirect With 301, Not 302
When a URL changes permanently, use a 301. A 302 tells Google to keep the old URL indexed — so your new URL never inherits the ranking.
Speed Is a Ranking Factor and a Conversion Factor
Core Web Vitals are measured on real users. Compressed images, deferred scripts and server caching move all three metrics at once.