Good SEO programming becomes great with coding skills to stay ahead of the competition.
To be a successful SEO expert, you don’t necessarily need to know how to code.
Although having coding abilities is not a requirement for SEO proficiency, having more talents always makes one more efficient.
Here are ten ways that understanding code can help a good SEO become great.
How To Improve SEO Coding Skills
1. SEO and HTML coding standards join forces
An SEO expert who knows HTML understands bad coding and how to construct web content.
HTML elements are to a webpage what a foundation, door, floor, and roof are to a house.
If HTML parts are not used correctly, search engines might not be able to crawl a website properly.
The official HTML specifications limit which HTML elements can be used in the “head”. Only browsers and bots can read metadata, but users see “body.”
The metadata will be indexed as part of the content when you insert body> elements (such as a> or div>) into the normally hidden head> section. It means that Google won’t index that page the way it should be indexed.
When the Facebook pixel code is improperly inserted into the page’s head, an error could occur.
The 400 error response message is another illustration of how poor coding skills affect SEO.
Some SEO coding experts believe a 400 error code is bad. This is because they assume it must be fixed when they see the word “error,”, especially in Google Search Console.
The 400 error code means the browser’s REQUEST for a page is wrong. This is because the page doesn’t exist, says an HTML-savvy SEO.
Typically, that is a good thing because it is what should occur and there is nothing wrong with it.
An SEO who knows HTML can identify more issues than one who doesn’t.
They can also ignore common SEO programming myths due to a lack of technical knowledge.
2. Structured Data
Structured data is a markup language, which means that there are rules for how the code should be written.
Google prefers JSON-LD structured data to describe Schema.org structured data because it’s easier to understand and figure out what’s wrong.
JSON-LD is rule-based and layered. The subject (called a Type) is followed by its attributes (called a Property).
JSON-LD structured data is easy to understand whether you know HTML or not.
It is impossible to exaggerate the advantages of knowing how to write organized data.
Structured data markup, or SERPs, is needed for many rich results positions on Google’s SERPs.
A webpage with improperly structured data markup won’t be eligible for rich results.
Google’s structured data markup checker can verify JSON-LD structured data for a rich result.
But just because the tool says that the code is valid doesn’t mean that it will get good results. In this case, being able to evaluate JSON-LD is used to fix the structured data and make it possible to find rich information.
Manual debugging skills are crucial because Google’s structured data checker notifies you when it’s wrong and where it’s broken. Nevertheless, it doesn’t explain how to solve it.
Of course, one can rely on plugins. Setting something down and letting it go has advantages.
But plugins frequently fall behind the ongoing evolution of structured data requirements. Additionally, they don’t always provide adequate detail for all circumstances.
Knowing how to code JSON-LD structured data can give you a ranking advantage over competitors.
3. Improve Client Communications
If you know how to code, you can make an explanation more clear so that a customer who doesn’t know how to code can understand what’s wrong and how to fix it.
What one does not understand cannot be explained.
An SEO coding expert who knows how to code structured data can explain why and how to integrate it.
If you know how to do coding for SEO, you can tell a client that they can do the same thing without installing a big plugin by adding a few lines of code to the child theme functions.php file of their WordPress site.
A person who knows how to code and is familiar with PHP can tell when it’s better to use a plugin instead of coding and then tell the customer why. This is in addition to the fact that an SEO without coding abilities wouldn’t even be aware of the functions.php file solution.
Knowing how to code allows you to examine HTML code and pinpoint site issues.
4. Knowledge Is Power.htaccess
Even though we find htaccess to be a difficult language to learn, we find it easy to use.
Knowing how to use.htaccess and its benefits is usually enough.
For instance, you can use a plugin to update specific sites that have moved from HTTP to HTTPS, to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, and to repair incorrect URLs.
However, all of that is possible using the.htaccess file.
If you know about.htaccess, you might be able to improve a website without using another plugin.
You can also use an.htaccess file to stop other websites from linking to your photos and other media files (hotlinking).
Htaccess files can be used to block bad bots’ IP ranges from copying your content.
Since adding tens of thousands to millions of IP addresses to a database will significantly slow down your site, doing something similar with a.htaccess file is much better than using a plugin or mod that adds the IP addresses to a database.
5. Identify Hidden Issues
HTML code hides coding errors.
Since most websites use templates, the same errors will appear on all pages. You must know HTML to understand the results of an HTML validator, even though it’s easy to use.
Coding for SEO mistakes, such as leaving off a closing bracket (>), can be apparent and evident.
It could also be subtly done, such as using a smart quote instead of the usual straight quotation mark (” “), which is a non-standard character in the code.
This issue frequently happens when someone copies code from a piece of software that automatically inserts smart quotes.
Curly quotes can significantly impede the indexing and parsing of a web page.
That means that if you use something like this in the HTML code,
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>
Google will not see it because the curly quotes (smart quotes) stop it from seeing it as a meta robots tag and will therefore proceed to index the content.
6. Coding Can Help You Get Out of SEO programming Deadlocks
Stalemate is a term from the chess game. It refers to a scenario in which play has halted and neither side can make a move to gain the upper hand. In essence, it’s a tie-breaking state.
The same problem happens in competitive fields where everyone uses the same publishing platforms, optimization plugins, content strategies, and link promotion techniques.
Since none of the sites clearly has an advantage over the others, there is a fair amount of competition between them.
A search engine optimizer who is also skilled in coding may be able to break through such a stalemate.
An SEO who knows how to code can come up with ways to improve JavaScript, CSS, and template design.
For instance, many designs come with a lot of heads for things like the side panel’s navigation that don’t need them.
If you know how to code, it’s simple to create a child theme and modify the errant heading elements so that they now style on-page elements with CSS rather than headings.
7. How To Fix A Hacked Website
Website security isn’t something an SEO expert should worry about.
But when a hacked site’s search results start to drop, it’s clear that SEO needs to worry about website security.
If you know how to code, especially how PHP files work in a certain content management system (CMS), it will be easier to figure out what happened during a hacking incident.
Understanding what went wrong and how to fix the issues begins with just having a general understanding of PHP and how all the components of the CMS interact.
The ability to code in JavaScript is also useful. Uploading or embedding JavaScript files can start a variety of attacks.
8. Having control comes from knowing how to code
When working in a corporate or educational setting with set templates, knowing how to code speeds up web page publishing.
No matter if one works in a Drupal or WordPress environment, being able to save a cheat sheet with code snippets saves so much time. For example, one doesn’t have to go through 10 steps to change a link using the native WYSIWYG interface and deal with peculiar code.
9. Increase Page Speed with SEO Programming
Learning to code will make Google’s PageSpeed Insights recommendations clearer.
It’s not like you have to start from scratch while learning how to code a website.
To speed up a website, one needs a basic understanding of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
When you know how servers send pages to browsers and how browsers show the information to site visitors, you can understand things like inlining CSS, combining JavaScript, and minifying JavaScript.
10. The Great Python
Python can automate SEO tasks like data analysis, NLP, and more.
There are many Python SEO programs available online, so it may not be necessary to create a tool from scratch.
Python is great because it gets rid of the need to write programs for all the different SEO tasks that need to be done. Download these scripts as Python libraries with the necessary modules.
A collection of modules is a library in Python. The files themselves are Python modules.
According to Ruth Everett’s Introduction to Python, the following Python libraries are helpful:
- “Pandas: Used for data manipulation and analysis.
- NumPy: Useful for scientific computing.
- SciPy: Used for scientific and technical computing.
- SciKit Learn: Machine learning for data mining and analysis.
- SpaCy: A great natural language processing library.
- Requests: A library for making HTTP requests.
- Beautiful Soup: Used to extract data from HTML and XML files.
- Matplotlib: For creating visualizations from data.”
