How to Apply Technical SEO to Your Code (Without Marketing Jargon)

Technical SEO has long been treated as something distant for developers, usually left to the marketing team. But the truth is, a huge part of SEO happens in the code: performance, indexing, accessibility, page structure. It all starts in our hands. 🚀

I’ve been diving deep into SEO (including the Technical SEO course from SEMrush Academy) and applying it a lot in my projects. In this article, I’ll share what I’ve learned so far and how to approach Search Engine Optimization in a practical, no-fluff way.

---

What is Technical SEO and Why it Matters for Devs

Technical SEO is the part of Search Engine Optimization that ensures search engines can understand, index, and rank your site correctly. For us devs, this means:

• Crawlability: making sure Googlebot can access your content without blocks.
• Performance: load speed, interactivity, and stability (Core Web Vitals).
• Structure: semantic HTML, sitemap.xml, robots.txt.
• Security and reliability: HTTPS, canonical tags, proper redirects.

If these foundations aren’t solid, any content or backlink strategy will struggle.

---

Essential Technical SEO Practices in 2025

Core Web Vitals

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long the main content takes to load.
• FID (First Input Delay): how responsive the site is to the first interaction.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how stable the layout is.

💡 Use PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse to measure and fix performance issues.

Mobile-first and Accessibility

Google now indexes mobile-first. If your app breaks on small screens, you’re already losing points.

• Test with the Lighthouse.
• Always use alt attributes on images (a11y + SEO on-page).
• Structure headings (h1, h2, h3) properly.

Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt

• Generate an updated sitemap.xml and submit it to Google Search Console.
• Configure robots.txt carefully to avoid blocking important pages.

Structured Data (schema.org)

Implement Schema.org to give search engines extra context. Example with JSON-LD for articles:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "How to Apply Technical SEO to Your Code",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Rian Tavares"
  },
  "datePublished": "2025-09-03"
}
</script>

---

Practical Tools for Devs

• Google Search Console → monitor indexing and errors.
• Screaming Frog → crawler to simulate Googlebot.
• Semrush / Ahrefs → technical audits and SEO best practices.
• Log file analysis → understand how bots really crawl your site.

These tools help you move from guesswork to data-driven SEO.

---

SEO is no longer just about Google

Beyond the classic practices, 2025 brings a new discussion: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). The idea is to optimize not only for traditional search engines but also for AI-driven answers (like Bard, ChatGPT, Perplexity). That means providing richer structured context and making sure your content is “understandable” by generative models.

It’s still early days, but worth keeping an eye on — SEO is no longer just about Google.

---

Technical SEO: More than Meta Tags

Technical SEO is much more than random meta tags. It’s about thinking code and architecture with a search engine mindset. The more devs master this, the bigger the real impact on projects.

And this article is just the start: soon I’ll publish one specifically on SEO with Astro, which has great optimization features.

👉 Now tell me: what technical SEO pain points have you faced in your projects?