Web development always goes hand in hand with SEO campaign. It means that each line of code in the website may have direct implication on the SEO performance. Many SEO professionals always say that on site optimization is essential for the overall success of our website. However, we should know that many of them actually don’t really know how to code. If these people want to call themselves as SEO consultants, we should make sure that they are able to code.
When talking with a SEO professional, we should talk to them about the extent of their coding capability. Editing meta tags can’t be considered as a coding task and it is a simple thing that can be performed by people who have near-zero coding knowledge and experience. Proper coding is essential if we want to make sure that these professionals are able to rank our website well enough in search results. Proper coding knowledge could allow us to streamline the structure of the website to make sure that search engine crawlers are able to properly index all pages.
It’s quite normal for SEO professional to understand about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But, they also need to understand about common web programming languages, such as ASP, JSP and PHP. This kind of knowledge put web developers at one step higher. The amount of code that SEO professionals can code correlates with their overall ability. The chief goal of a website is to deliver quality content at the highest possible performance level. This can’t be achieved if the website has bloated code that is badly coded.
Pages won’t open quickly even if users have high speed broadband connection. SEO professionals should be able to detect current inefficiencies and look for ways to optimize them. Poor navigational structure could also make it harder for crawlers to properly index all pages. In essence, bad coding in SEO perspective is codes that prevent bots from fully crawling the website and prevent users from loading pages quickly enough. Poor performance could also be caused by bad database configuration and it is a good thing if SEO professional understands more about database techniques.
If the code inside our website is bloated, it means that we are using more code that needed to display the content. Our website will take much longer to load and we will have lower chance of getting to the top position in search results. Even a complex main page should be downloaded in seconds with moderate Internet connection speed. User experience is an important factor that can bring our website to move forward.
Our website can progress much more smoothly, if it is clean of inefficiencies. SEO professionals who know how to code will be like shipyard maintenance guy who scrape that bottom of our boat, so it will clean of seaweed and barnacles. If our website is slim and lean enough, it will be able to take full advantage of fast Internet connection and hardware configuration. Even with maximum propulsion, poorly maintained boats can’t move quickly enough.