Why Learning Programming Can Be Beneficial for SEO

A process of getting real organic traffic from different sources, whether its editorial or natural on search results, is called Search Engine Optimization. Now the thing is many individuals get confused if learning programming as an SEO expert can be beneficial or not because both look at websites with different intentions.

There is a misconception that the only way to succeed in this industry is to be an SEO expert or to be a website developer, which I personally don’t believe.

If you’re a search engine optimizer, A programming skill can be a plus point for you to optimize your website technically so that you don’t have to roam here and there. to find a developer and pay him for some minor site issues.

It will save you money. It will also cut your cost to hire a developer and to pay him.

Being a programmer myself, I can feel the benefits that I would love to share with the readers. Let’s discuss the TIPS on how programming can enhance your career in SEO.

A Better Understanding of Critical Technical Issues

As a technical SEO, you’re going to search for programming error messages you encounter to solve specific problems when you get stuck. Those little problems can occur anytime, whether it is from shortening your site code to messy URLs, plugin issues to javascript errors, ugly CSS issues last but not checking all the response code, and fixing them.

You Are Most Likely to Believe in Automation

A process of generating tools that execute tasks without the help of human intervention and to make the tasks easier for humans refers to Automation.

The Internet is filled up with different kinda softwares, promising to help with SEO, PPC, lead generation, and other critical tasks that digital marketers struggle with on a daily basis.

So, what happens when you can’t find a tool that meets the needs of your business?. You are most likely to believe in making your own tool,

An example where Chris Ainsworth created a tool to extract URLs from SERP results or any active page using javascript. That can help you to shorten your work because doing the same task, in the same way, is so old school kinda thing.

Now see the most readable article of search engine journal was about python usage in technical SEO, which clearly shows how learning programming as SEO can be a great benefit for you

In that Article, Ruth Everett defines how python can help you automate most of your SEO tasks that other tools failed to provide.

For Example:

1. Image Captioning,

2. Analyze the structure of a site,

3. Image Optimizer and many more

Improving Your Website Structure on Your Own

Improving your website structure is a must-have a thing to do, which a lot of so-called Wannabe SEO‘s failed to do or maybe that don’t know about that. So for that, we all have to understand what a sitemap is and why it’s an aspect of SEO.

Site Structure

A website’s structure refers to how your website is set up, i.e., how the individual subpages are linked to one another. At the point when sites have countless subpages, It is particularly important for crawlers so that they can find all subpages quickly and easily.

It’s not just about Crawlers, but also for those visitors who are coming on your website on a daily basis. You have to make sure your website’s structure is good enough so that visitors can stay on your website for a longer time.

Importance of Site Structure in SEO

A well-defined site structure has great importance in terms of SEO. It makes the job of search engine crawlers and spiders easier. Better and faster indexing and more chances in achieving higher rankings.

Apart from that, If the structure is grouped properly into categories, Search engines can understand better for which targeted topic you want to rank for.

What Are the Consequences of Having a Bad Site Structure?

Site architecture is like the core of your site on which your content curation based. It is a way that both users and search engines can navigate your content easily.

Search engines need to navigate your site to find the content to curate. A Poor site structure will prohibit search engines from actually finding your content.

For example, Your site has content that requires user inputs to access; search engines will be hard-pressed to present it in their keyword results.

Bad sites tend to throw everything at you at once. Instead of concentrating more on the user experience. They tend to throw tons of information at the user before knowing their desire or what they are looking for.

What can overwhelm them and make them sift through all the information you provided to find what they’re looking for.

And with that, these Poor structure sites face a lot of consequences which include:

• According to a survey, 75% of consumers judge a website or business by their site structure. So if you don’t have a good structure. Congrats, you have lost a customer.
• A poor site structure will take a lot of page load speed, which a user doesn’t expect.
• Google will never rank these kinds of websites. Instead, there is a higher probability of a penalty by google.
• A poor Site can hurt you in increasing the conversion rate of your website 

How Can I Improve My Website Structure?

Before 2002, the most used site structure on every website was Flat site structure in which were connected to home pages instead of there respected niches. This strategy has existed for a long time.

In 2002, Brett Tabke suggests a whole new model for site structure called Theme pyramids. The basic idea was to create category pages designed to rank for your top keyword and then split them in there respective sub-categories.

By reading this guide by google webmaster, you can learn it, and later on, you can try it by yourself on your website.

If you have Multipotential skills and knowledge of both SEO and programming, then Kudos, you can set up your website manually and make your visitors stay on your website for a longer period of time.

You Have a Closer Understanding of Crawling Issues Occurring

There are many technical issues on your site that are creating hurdles in the ranking of your site. Being SEO, you can easily find the issues, but what when it comes to solving them?

You are not gonna ping your developer again and again? Isn’t it? Or is wasting your precious money just for these minor issues, correct?

Being an SEO friendly developer, you can sort these things by yourself. All you have to do is go to the web file in your web host and try to sort them out.

Or A few lines of code can do for your website too,

like see if your websites crawler is blocked by some code in your robot.txt file, You are facing broken link issues, Duplicated URLs issues, Web server misconfiguration, poor website architecture and other technical issues that you can fix all these problems by yourself easily

Understand the Development Issues Better

What if you don’t know what’s going wrong with your site, and you can’t describe it to your developer? Well, either you will be manipulated by the developer, or you will end up getting penalized by google.

The choice is yours, buddy!

By learning programming as SEO, you will be smart enough to have knowledge of programming, so it will be easy for both developers and you to solve the critical problems as you already know where your site is lacking and what issues to fix.

Solving CSS and Javascript Issues

There are hundreds of crazy technical things that become easier to find once you start learning programming, Most probably the first thing that pops up when you are doing an SEO audit is page speed which most commonly shows the error related to CSS and javascript.

You can see the above image, below 4 out of 5 errors are showing an error about CSS and javascript, which are causing issues of load speed. According to a survey by section.io, 9.6% of users bounce when page speed is 2 seconds while 32.3% of users bounce when page speed is 7 seconds or more.

Conclusion

Now you’ve understood why learning programming as an SEO can be beneficial For you. This is where you get an extra edge in SEO where you know all minor issues of your site, and you know how to solve them and make it a perfectly optimized site.

programmer working -DepositPhotos