Nowadays, the world of digital marketing is a competitive battlefield. Like any battlefield, it’s crucial to be fully equipped, which means having a strategic content plan and effective marketing tools.
Indeed, content is king. However, some strategies must not be missed to ensure optimized search engine rankings. Coding is one of them.
For many webmasters, search engine optimization (SEO) is about boosting specific on-page variables to maximize the chances of being ranked for keywords or soliciting backlinks from qualified sources to strengthen off-page SEO. However, coding also plays a critical role in your site’s optimization. By harnessing coding for SEO, you are like building something on a robust foundation.
To help you understand why coding is essential when doing SEO, we’ll walk you through their relationship and how the former can boost your SEO. Let’s dive right in!
Does one need coding skills for SEO?
SEO doesn’t essentially require hands-on coding. But learning to code is a huge plus.
With coding skills and knowledge of technical SEO, one has a significant advantage in better optimizing a website and understanding technical issues that need addressing. A good understanding of SEO source code can also help a professional determine how to display a webpage content and peek at your competitors’ website source code.
To make the most of SEO practices, it’s crucial to have a good technical infrastructure, which includes programming. This programming is essential to optimize a site, especially for Google and cross-platform compatibility.
How coding helps SEO
SEO and coding are profoundly linked, thus providing benefits to each other. To know more about these benefits, let’s discuss how coding helps SEO.
1. Coding facilitates a seamless page experience for users
Page Experience involves a set of factors that measures how satisfactory it is for users to interact with a page beyond its pure information value.
Search engines like Google favor what works for the users better. So, with proper and well-written code, you ensure hassle-free webpage interaction. This means having a technical front that complements your user interface. With this, your website becomes more favorable for Google, thus resulting in improved search rankings.
2. Coding makes indexing easier for the web crawlers
Many say that SEO professionals must have even a little knowledge of HTML and CSS. This may be primarily because making changes to or improving the HTML tags, microdata, and website architecture, allow search engine algorithms to locate, understand, and rank the website faster.
3. Code validation allows for search engine spider accessibility
Search engine spider programs usually have serious limitations in terms of crawling and indexing your website. Given that they only effectively read text, other elements on your site—image, video, audio, and script files—can avert important site text from being crawled and indexed properly.
Should you notice that many parts of your text are missing from your web pages, if you have code validation skills, you can better cross-check if search engines can find your data.
4. Create SEF URL rewrites with coding
Making search-engine-friendly (SEF) URLs, which you can rewrite with coding, is advantageous for both SEO and user experience. To reduce the number of inapposite characters and codes in your URL, you’ll have to modify your website’s codes. But this depends on the specific platform your site runs on. If your site uses WordPress or another content management system (CMS), you will have access to internal dashboards or plugins that will permit you to make important changes. When it comes to open source e-commerce platforms though, you may need to address your permalink structure within your hypertext access file.
5. Coding allows you to establish 301 redirects for proper PageRank flow
When it comes to setting up proper 301 redirects, From an SEO perspective, there are two coding situations to consider in terms of setting up effective 301 redirects. First, you utilize this code to notify search engines that both world wide web (www) and non-www URL versions should be treated equally. Second, should you ever move content within your website, you establish a 301 redirect to inform search engine spiders of the action. By doing so, you reduce the potential loss of PageRank that may occur when backlinks can no longer resolve to your previous URLs.
6. Accelerate loading times with combined code files
In recent times, site loading speed has been considered as a huge search engine ranking factor per Google’s stated desire to reward swift sites in the search results. Unfortunately, if your site is built using many different scripts for additional functionality purposes, loading all the various code files will significantly bring down your site’s performance. To minimize long loading times due to excess script demands, it’s best to combine these individual code sheets into a smaller number of files. This way, you also improve your site’s overall SEO.
7. Utilize “rel=canonical” to deal with duplicate content issues
You may have duplicate content issues if you use a CMS program like Magento, Joomla, or WordPress to build your site. Every time you generate a new post for your website, these systems may automatically create any or all of the following options:
- Yoursite.com/post-name.html
- Yoursite.com/category1/post-name.html
- Yoursite.com/archive/date/post-name.html
Since these different URLs redirect to the same page, search engines may subject you to duplicate content filters within their platforms, especially if you don’t specify exactly how each URL should be regarded or treated. To instruct search engines to better handle your URLs, you can use the “rel=canonical” tag. You can add this feature to your website’s <head> section and tell the search engines to disregard, redirect, or index a specific page for the URL.
In a Nutshell
SEO and coding altogether may be a complex concept, but by considering the best practices and benefits above, you can effectively optimize your search engine rankings and achieve your marketing goals.
