Coding - where to start?
-
I've been working in digital marketing for a few years and over the past 2, I've concentrated on getting my head around (or trying to!) the world of SEO.
Everything from reading this forum, listening to webinars and re-reading the beginners guide to SEO has provided me with the confidence to put in actionable insights into my work such as on page optimisation, keyword research, link build and passing this knowledge onto co-workers
However, one area I am beginning to realise is just as important is having the ability to code for yourself.
Can anyone out there point me in the right direction of where to start, what I program I should concentrate on? and what I shuld focus my energies on?
Any help would be great
Simon
-
Brilliant, thanks guys - much appreciated
Simon
-
Hi
Try some of these places to start.
Lynda.com is excellent. They have some free courses available, but full access is a monthly subscription.
Sitepoint has some great stuff, including this HTML reference
O'Reily has excellent books.
Also, searching on YouTube is good, sometimes way easier to see someone walk through a screencast.
As a language, I would choose PHP/MySQL because its so common, and especially where WordPress uses PHP, that's probably the web language you'll be looking at most.
This is the official PHP site. - Although it can be a bit intense for beginners, but it is the official source.
-Dan
-
W3Schools is a very good source to start w/ HTML/CSS/XHTML.
-
I would definitely get up to speed with Javascript too, a lot of sites use that, you might not need to be able to code it but being able to read it and understand it's implications would be helpful.
Also flash, whilst it is a pain, understand how this works with SEO (you can do some things around it) would be good.
But definitely get yourself on a basic HTML and CSS course!
A
-
I found this site helpful for learning the basics http://www.html.net/
-
Thanks Sha
Any good basic sites/forums you'd recommend?
simon
-
Hi Simon,
I would suggest starting with the basics - getting a good grounding in HTML and CSS will make a huge difference when you are not restricted to getting someone else to make every change for you. You will also find it easier to work with your tech people once you know the basics.
Once you get a taste for it I suspect you'll find yourself seeking out other languages to learn.
Hope that helps,
Sha
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to redirect 302 status to 301 status code using wordpress
I just ran the link opportunity option within site explorer and it shows that 31 pages are currently in a 302 status. Should I try to convert the 302's to 301's? And what is the easiest way to do this? I see several wordpress plugins that claim to do 301 redirects but I don't know which to choose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | vmsolu0 -
Drop in traffic at start of December 2014
Hello! I've noticed a drop in organic Google traffic to our ecommerce site. The drop started on the 1st December 2014. The difference compared with last year is around -25%. I've taken a look at landing pages for the organic Google traffic: Homepage: -40%
Technical SEO | | Bike_Co-op_Webmaster
Product pages: -31%
Category pages: -7%
Blog pages: -7% On the 1st December our site was down for a few hours in the early morning for some scheduled maintenance. I got a couple of emails from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that there was an "Increase in server errors" and "Googlebot can't access your site". Once the site maintenance was complete there haven't been any further emails from Google about this. I doubt the site being down is the cause of the drop in traffic. I suspect it may have been caused by the latest Penguin updates around the end of November 2014. Can anyone advise if this sounds like it is the cause, and why the homepage and products pages have been hit so severely? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!0 -
Https and 404 code that goes into htaccess
The 404 error code we put into htaccess files for our websites does not work correctly for our https site. We recently changed one of our http sites to https. When we went to create a 404.html page for it by creating an htaccess folder with the 404 error code in it, once we uploaded the file all of our webpages were displaying incorrectly, as if the css was not attached. The 404 code we used works successfully for our other 404.html pages for our other sites (www.telfordinc.com/404.html). However, it does not work for the https site. Below is the 404 error code we are using for our https site (currently not uploaded until pages display correctly) ErrorDocument 404 /404-error.html RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?privatemoneyhardmoneyloan.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F] Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.privatemoneyhardmoneyloan.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.privatemoneyhardmoneyloan.com/$1 [R=301,L] So we want to know if there is a different 404 error code that goes into the htaccess file for an https vs. http? Appreciate your feedback on this issue
Technical SEO | | Manifestation0 -
If content is at the bottom of the page but the code is at the top, does Google know that the content is at the bottom?
I'm working on creating content for top category pages for an ecommerce site. I can put them under the left hand navigation bar, and that content would be near the top in the code. I can also put the content at the bottom center, where it would look nicer but be at the bottom of the code. What's the better approach? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Help with this metadata code!
My website developer used the code below for my metadata but SEomoz is showing an error for my metadata. How can I change with this code so it will work?
Technical SEO | | CapitolShine0 -
No Search Results Found - Should this return status code 404?
A question came up today on how to correctly serve the right status code on pages where no search results are found. I did a couple searches on some major eccomerce and news sites and they were ALL serving status code 200 for No Search Results Found http://www.zappos.com/dsfasdgasdgadsg http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sdafasdklgjasdklgjsjdjkl http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=dfjakljgdkslagklasd&_sacat=0 http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=sdgadgdsagas&x=0&y=0&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sdagasdgasdgasg I thought I read somewhere were it was recommended to serve a status code 404 on these types of pages. Based on what I found above, all sites were serving a 200, so it appears this may not be the best practice. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | WEB-IRS0 -
500 error codes caused by W3 Total Cache plugin?
Hello Everyone, I operate a site (http://www.nationalbankruptcyforum.com) that has been receiving 500 error codes in Webmaster Tools as of late. This morning, webmaster tools showed 129 500 crawling errors. I've included one of the URLs that contained an error message here: http://www.nationalbankruptcyforum.com/marriage-and-bankruptcy/do-my-wife-and-i-both-have-to-file-for-bankruptcy/ I've been getting these errors now for about 3 weeks and they've mostly been on obscure, strange URLs (lots of numbers etc.) however, this morning they started showing up on pages that will actually be trafficked by users. I'm really not sure where they're coming from, although I do believe it's a software issue as I've had my hosting company take a look to no avail. I have had some development work done recently and am running the W3 Total Cache plugin (my site is built on WP). I also run the Yoast SEO plugin and rely on it to publish an XML sitemap among other things. Anyone have any idea where these 500 errors originate from? Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | oconn1460 -
URL with tracking code
Hi there, At the company i am currently working for we have a problem with shortcut url with tracking in it. They send a lot of brochures with a shortcut URL which redirects to the page of the event with tagging. For example The real URL is:
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen
http://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/ The URL in the brochure is:
www.sbo.nl/schoolleiderpo this then redirects to: h
ttp://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/?utm_source=direct&utm_medium=shortcut&utm_campaign=schoolleiderpo Now we can measure the effect of the brochure on on-line traffic and conversion. This is great but a lot of website link to that shortcut url and if the event is put offline the links to it generate an 404. We have now about 800 backlinks that generate this 404 and i want to fix it. Another big problem "i think" is the possibility that google will index this url with tagging. Now i have 2 options: 1. look at al the url with that 404 and redirect them with a 301 to the best page 2. create the shortcut on an page that is most suitable but then i will get the tagging in the URL and i guess google will see this as dublicate content. It is possible that in the future the shortcut url will be used again. What would you suggest as the best sollution.0