Developers play a great role behind the success of the SEO. The process of updating noindex tag setting, website’s performance and many other things depend on the developers. 

The developers are responsible for noindex tag settings , and the actions on the websites and many other things. 

But, many of the developers do not understands the responsibility which rests on their shoulders, and what will go wrong if they make a small mistake in the coding. 

The Reason Behind the DIvide Between SEOs and Developers

There are numerous reasons for the divide between the developers and SEOs. They both experienced a bad relationship with each other

Eg- Developers were affected by giving untrustworthy services by black-hat SEOs, and SEOs experienced a pushback by the developers when asked to do some modifications.

There also exist some mutual problems on both sides, like their lack of knowledge about each other’s work. They don’t know anything about the priorities of the other. This led to their divide. 

A good relationship can only establish if they become fully aware about each other’s works and   priorities.

The Reason This Poses a Huge Problem

This difference between the SEOs and the developers are making the businesses lose a huge amount of their money. There are numerous steps in between the discovering of codes to fixing it. These steps are:

1. The release of the code- Consists of no index tag in an important conversion page.   

2. Changes detected by Google- The page is dropped from index.

3. Concern about traffic and loss of revenue- SEO checks the page for this matter.

4. New fix is entered in the dev queue- The new solution have to be logged in the development queue as a ticket.

5. The implementation of the fix- The fix is done after all the other problems are resolved. 

6. The page is reanalyzed by Google- The reanalyzing of this page by Google will take time. 

This entire procedure will take months, and for bigger companies it will take longer as they will have bigger chains of communication and bigger development queues. 

After all these processes, this nonindexed page may not recover fully and may not get the   amount of traffic it used to get. This is due to the fact that the time for which your page was unavailable, your competitors may have created a page which might have a stronger presence and may be ranking better than your page.

All these procedures could be avoided if the developers have knowledge about the noindex tags. After that only an SEO training or some quick conversion at the beginning would have done the job.

The Things SEOs need to do to Make their Relationship Better with the Developers

Developers and marketers are vastly different from each other. Both of their approaches to a problem is very different

So these are the steps an SEO can take to understand the developers and make their bonding strong.

Know the Priorities of your Engineer

Communicating with the developers about the SEO problems will help them to get a good understanding of their work and their priorities.

Based on their field of study, the engineers will have different priorities. If you can understand these priorities of the engineers, you will be able to communicate with them more effectively. 

The main focus of different engineers are

1. Front-End-Engineers

a. Design

b. Feel and look

c. CX

d. UX

2. DevOps Engineers

a. Help with smooth releases.

b. To provide infrastructure to other engineers for doing their jobs.

c. Work effectively and doing the job once.

d. Giving out high quality code.

3. Back-End Engineers

a. Automation.

b. Writing software.

c. Processing and moving large amounts of data.

d. Making APIs.

The ways in which SEOs can Affect the Main Priorities 

By now you may have quite a good understanding of the things which are of importance to the developers. By knowing these priorities, you can now explain the necessity of a specific fix. This will be much more appealing to the developers and they will now pay attention to you.

Eg- the SEO issues which will deliver a bad user experience will be looked upon by the front-end engineer, and the SEO fixes to manage data and clean them up will be looked upon by the back-end engineer.

The reasons for which a developer does not care about the SEO because they think that an SEO has nothing to do regarding their jobs. But that is not true, an SEO can have a direct impact on the developers and also on their work.

After this you need to explain how the developers affect the SEO. The SEOs are affected in the ways like using tags which can remove any pages from Google’s index, files which are able to make the loading time very less, and using snippets which can break the HTML etc.

Gather information on the Engineering Industry

The developers will be impressed when they see an SEO who can communicate in their language and have a good knowledge about the working of the web. This will make the conversation smooth as you both will be on the same page. 

However to make the developers impressed must not be your only motivation to gain knowledge on the engineering industry. Gaining this knowledge will help you to be a good SEO and elevate your technical skills.

You will be able to gain knowledge about the latest frameworks and technologies if you follow the top engineers on Twitter. You will have to be aware of any new announcements from important conferences like:

1. Microsoft Build.

2. Google I/O.

3. Smashing Conf.

4. Chrome Dev Summit.

Put up a Specific Goal and Result for Projects 

Sometimes the SEOs can ask the developers for more without giving a second thought about whether the requests are clear to the developers to work upon and if it can be achieved.

To avoid these situations, a goal and expected result should, which will make both the SEOs and the developers happy, needs to be set. 

For bringing the developers on board to your plan, you request should include the following things:

1. About the problem.

2. Why requires fixing.

3. The requirements.

4. The end result.

The developers hate lengthy instructions. Make sure to provide the instruction in a precise manner, and it should contain only the important information. This will reduce the time they will require to read a lengthy instruction, and they will be able to start working on it quickly.

Get Acquainted with their Current Workflow

When you will get acquainted with the work structure of your developers, you will then be able to  very easily insert your requests in their timeline.

This will make the work smooth and no one’s work will be held up because of the other.

You must also gain knowledge about your developer’s sprint and planning cycle and what kind of tools and tickets they use.

By knowing all about your developers work patterns, you will be able to insert your requests very easily within their workflow and will give the best result. 

Conclusion

So, the SEO and the developers should work together to make a project more successful. In order to do that they need to improve their relationship. 

By following the methods in the article, the effect of digital divide between the SEO and the developers can improve by a huge margin. If they are able to accomplish a good communication between them, then they can achieve success on any project they will be working on.