SEO for Developers: Technical Checklist That Actually Moves the Needle

Most devs treat SEO as voodoo. Here's the concrete technical work that actually affects rankings.

Must-Do Technical SEO

1. Core Web Vitals

Google's ranking signal. Three metrics:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) < 2.5s
• FID (First Input Delay) < 100ms
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) < 0.1

# Check your site's Core Web Vitals
npx lighthouse https://yoursite.com --output=html

2. Structured Data

Help Google understand your content:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Your Title",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Your Name" },
  "datePublished": "2026-01-01"
}
</script>

3. Sitemap & Robots.txt

# robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Generate sitemaps automatically:

npx next-sitemap # for Next.js

Content That Ranks

Technical SEO gets you in the game. Content gets you wins:

1. Answer questions people actually ask (use "People Also Ask")
2. Cover topics comprehensively (Google rewards depth)
3. Update content regularly (freshness matters)
4. Build internal links (connect related content)

The Honest Truth

SEO takes time. 6-12 months to see results is normal. Focus on making something genuinely useful first, then optimize for search. For app store SEO specifically, ExtensionBooster has dedicated tools for Chrome Web Store and Google Play optimization.