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One of the undervaluated elements of the search engine explosion phenomenon is that web developers are now directly involved in the search engine marketing process. To rank well in these organic results, it may not be enough to “write relevant content,” as your typical search engine marketing tutorial drones. Rather, the web application developer must work together with the marketing team, and he or she must build a web site fully aware that certain features or technologies may interfere with a search engine marketing campaign. An improperly designed web site can interfere with a search engine’s need to periodically navigate and index the information contained therein.

In the worst case, the search engine may not be able to index the content at all.

Planning a search engine friendly website architecture is a good start before implementing any seo campaign and can help your pages to rank better in the three major search engines.

We remember the days when search engine optimization was a black art of analyzing and improving on-page factors. Search engine marketers were obsessed over keyword density and which HTML tags to use. Many went so far as to recommend optimizing content for different search engines individually, thusly creating different pages with similar content optimized with different densities and tags. Today, that would create a problem called duplicate content. The current struggle is creating a site with interactive content and navigation with a minimal amount of duplicate content, with URLs that do not confuse web spiders, and a tidy internal linking structure.

A black hat marketer may also use some sort of signature in a web application to find many sites using a search engine, such as a version number or tagline. Therefore, it is imperative that any web developer understands this, because being exploited may be to your detriment in rankings, not to mention corporate image. It’s clear that nobody wants hundreds of links to spam sites on their forums or comments. Security notwithstanding, the first step to protect your web site is to keep software that is not under your auspices, that is, third-party software, up-to-date. For example, not too long ago, many blogging applications did not apply the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links in comments — because it had not been adopted yet! This weakness had been exploited extensively in the past by black hat SEOs.