Technical SEO for Developers: The Ranking Factors You Can Actually Control

I used to think SEO was mostly a scam -- marketing people rearranging keywords and praying to the Google gods. Then I started shipping my own products and realized that organic search traffic is the difference between a project that gets used and one that doesn't. I also realized that a large chunk of SEO is purely technical, and developers are uniquely positioned to get it right. Here's what actually matters, stripped of the marketing fluff. How search engines see your page When Googlebot crawls your page, it doesn't see what you see. It sees HTML. It parses the DOM, evaluates the content structure, follows links, measures load performance, and indexes the text content. Your beautiful CSS layout is invisible to it. Your JavaScript-rendered content might be invisible too, depending on how you've built your site. The first thing to understand: Google renders JavaScript, but it's a two-phase process. In the first pass, Googlebot fetches the HTML and indexes whatever is there. In the seco