by jennita

This list is derived directly from the responses I received via Twitter, Facebook, IM and email from 13 different developers. With that, here's a list of ways developers can optimize their site for highest impact, with the lowest amount of effort, from their perspectives.

1. Title Tag

This was overwhelmingly the top response by most of the developers. Many of them specifically mentioned building dynamic title tags, and not just hand coding each page.

Reference: Best Practices for Title Tags

2. Canonical URL Tag

Multiple people mentioned the canonical URL tag which I found very exciting. In the SEO world we all got super giddy when this tag came out, and it's great to know that it has surfaced as an important feature for developers as well.

Reference: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

3. Permalinks

Get your URLs right! I built dynamic URLs for years that were not user friendly at all. There are so many options to rewrite and redirect your URLs, and many CMS's are getting more and more SEO savvy.

Reference: Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs - The Best Practice for SEO is Still Clear

4. Robots.txt

Although the robots.txt file is there to help a site owner make sure that the right areas are being crawled, if it set up incorrectly it could do more damage than it's worth. The theme from the developers was to make sure that you don't have "Disallow: /" or are in some way blocking access to relevant areas of the site.

Reference: Managing Robot's Access To Your Website - From janeandrobot.com

5. Image Alt Attribute

For me, this should actually be moved further up the list. This is a big one, as we've been talking about lately that keyword rich (not spammy) image alt attributes correlate with higher rankings. Now before you go and get all huffy, puffy about this one, watch the Whiteboard Friday about Correlation, Causation and SEO.

[seomoz]