Beef Up Your Web Development Resume with These 6 Skills

While being a coding rockstar is undoubtedly mission No. 1 for any web developer, there are a number of other skills that will make your resume stand out from the rest – and ensure that your clients keep coming back for more.

SEO: understanding the basic principles of search engine optimization and current best practices is a major plus for many recruiters or technical hiring managers. Since driving and growing traffic via organic search is a fairly standard objective for many web projects, so a developer who can provide a strong foundation for the search team (or even work hand-in-hand with them) will stand out in the applicant pool.

PPC Management: like SEO, understanding paid search advertising (or at least what is required for a landing page to achieve high quality score) will help increase your value as a web developer. Not only does SEM and PPC knowledge make you a favorite of the marketing team (everyone loves the developer that makes their job easier), but being capable of not only building optimized landing pages, but developing and executing PPC campaigns yourself is another way to set yourself apart.

Social Media Advertising: An understanding of how advertising on Facebook and Twitter and other social networks functions and how best to optimize your apps, landing pages, and more can be invaluable for programmers who have clients that are looking to capitalize on current social media trends.

Whether you are simply integrating social media into a website or building custom tabs and apps, an up-to-date comprehension of how the various paid advertising options work on popular social media sites can help evolve an employer or possible employer’s perception of your skillset from that of a “builder” to a “guru”.

Web Analytics: The ability to understand how your clients’ sites are performing and to quickly generate actionable reports via Google Analytics, Webtrends, Adobe’s Analytics Suite (Powered by Omniture), and other free or paid analytics software programs accompanied by a thorough analysis and actionable next steps that inform you and the team’s development process can help set you apart from the competition.

In addition, being able to understand how users actually interact with your completed projects in the digital realm can lead to a much richer consideration of the standard user experience (because let’s face it, most programmers and developers are not typically their own target audience).

Copywriting/Copyediting: Even if you’ve never aspired to be a copywriter in the traditional sense, the ability to create tutorials, articles, and other educational material is valuable on its own – and so is the capability to edit and make suggestions on writing supplied by your clients. After all, clients and their copywriters aren’t infallible, and sometimes the best suggestions and feedback come from the very person or team who are responsible for building the website, application, or other delivery platform for the message that the client and their copywriters are trying to convey.

Information Architecture: Being a truly standout developer requires more than just creating clean code that functions according to the client’s objectives. By having an understanding of what makes a user interface successful, how to optimize a user’s path and drive them to conversion, and follow related best practices, a programmer can transform him or herself from an order-filler to a sculptor of an incredibly successful project.

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Jacqueline Zenn is a tech writer and digital trends consultant who has contributed to Mashable, Crain’s, AOL and Agency Post, among others. She’s also appeared on NBC on WGN. Previously, she worked at several leading interactive agencies creating and executing digital strategies. Follow her @jazspin or connect on LinkedIn