Why not? While there are lots of terrible SEO consultants and stupid recommendations, knowing how SEO actually works and the way it rewards good, up-to-date content, is incredibly valuable. And knowing how things really work is the best way to defeat the crummy suggestions and gimmicks that a misinformed marketer might suggest.

When the article title includes the words "every programmer", that's a really large set of programmers. I don't think a programmer working on embedded systems needs to know about SEO, nor do kernel hackers, nor do scientific programmers...

Until they want their sexy opensource library to be used by more than one person.

Make good enough library, keep the source valid and the persons will come.

I have never done any special SEO tricks and yet all my content is fairly high on the results.

SEO in general is quite useless in my opinion. Make the content good enough so that people want to visit the site! Don't trick people to come there.

Oh, the engineer marketing moto: make a good product and customers will come. So appealing and so false!

I'm not doubting your experience, but this is such a common misconception that I must point it out.

If usage of your product is not what puts food on the table, by all means go for the engineering marketing approach. It's genuine.

If you need customers to have a roof on top of your head, though, learn marketing. It's not evil, it is necessary, and strange as it may seem, it is as important to success as product quality.

I think he means if your website contains information google can find it. simple as that. only thing you really need to know is that text on its own is more easily searched than images. but that should be obvious to any one.

A very large number of programmers spend their time working on non-web code for companies. I don't need SEO at all... that's what our marketing department is for.

The title should have been "10 Articles Every Java Web Developer Should Read," and even then a few of them would be out of place.

The implication in my post was that this was for a pet project where you are the marketing team and things like choosing a good project name that's actually searchable matter.

Otherwise you end up with things called "Go" and "Ruby", both of which took years to become googlable.

In those areas, SEO is going to have little to do with the uptake of their libraries.

I'm just assuming here, but I think the parent commenter was referring to the fact that not every programmer needs to know SEO, since there are several disciplines that don't depend on search engine results.

SEO tactics and practices change so rapidly... almost any article or book written about SEO is outdated by the time it's released (unfortunately). Tactics that were considered "best practices" even 6 months ago may actually harm your site these days. -- There is no magic bullet for SEO.

I realize this is going to come as something of a shock to you, but most of the programmers in the world aren't cool kids working at the Next Big web startup. SEO isn't part of their world, never will be, and SEO consultants never come knocking at their door.

Maybe front-end developers; but agreed, not every programmer should know SEO.