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.
