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
-
Unsolved Using NoIndex Tag instead of 410 Gone Code on Discontinued products?
Hello everyone, I am very new to SEO and I wanted to get some input & second opinions on a workaround I am planning to implement on our Shopify store. Any suggestions, thoughts, or insight you have are welcome & appreciated! For those who aren't aware, Shopify as a platform doesn't allow us to send a 410 Gone Code/Error under any circumstance. When you delete or archive a product/page, it becomes unavailable on the storefront. Unfortunately, the only thing Shopify natively allows me to do is set up a 301 redirect. So when we are forced to discontinue a product, customers currently get a 404 error when trying to go to that old URL. My planned workaround is to automatically detect when a product has been discontinued and add the NoIndex meta tag to the product page. The product page will stay up but be unavailable for purchase. I am also adjusting the LD+JSON to list the products availability as Discontinued instead of InStock/OutOfStock.
Technical SEO | | BakeryTech
Then I let the page sit for a few months so that crawlers have a chance to recrawl and remove the page from their indexes. I think that is how that works?
Once 3 or 6 months have passed, I plan on archiving the product followed by setting up a 301 redirect pointing to our internal search results page. The redirect will send the to search with a query aimed towards similar products. That should prevent people with open tabs, bookmarks and direct links to that page from receiving a 404 error. I do have Google Search Console setup and integrated with our site, but manually telling google to remove a page obviously only impacts their index. Will this work the way I think it will?
Will search engines remove the page from their indexes if I add the NoIndex meta tag after they have already been index?
Is there a better way I should implement this? P.S. For those wondering why I am not disallowing the page URL to the Robots.txt, Shopify won't allow me to call collection or product data from within the template that assembles the Robots.txt. So I can't automatically add product URLs to the list.0 -
Using 410 To Remove URLs Starting With Same Word
We had a spam injection a few months ago. We successfully cleaned up the site and resubmitted to google. I recently received a notification showing a spike in 404 errors. All of the URLS have a common word at the beginning injected via the spam: sitename.com/mono
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu
sitename.com/mono.php?buy-good-essays
sitename.com/mono.php?professional-paper-writer There's about 100 total URLS with the same syntax with the word "mono" in them. Based on my research, it seems that it would be best to serve a 410. I wanted to know what the line of HTACCESS code would be to do that in bulk for any URL that has the word "mono" after the sitename.com/0 -
422 vs 404 Status Codes
We work with an automotive industry platform provider and whenever a vehicle is removed from inventory, a 404 error is returned. Being that inventory moves so quickly, we have a host of 404 errors in search console. The fix that the platform provider proposed was to return a 422 status code vs a 404. I'm not familiar with how a 422 may impact our optimization efforts. Is this a good approach, since there is no scalable way to 301 redirect all of those dead inventory pages.
Technical SEO | | AfroSEO0 -
Why would I suddenly start seeing a spike in hits from particular bots (specifically rogerbot, google, bing, and yahoo)?
We have seen consistent network traffic over the past month, then starting yesterday, huge spikes in hits (hits as in crawls to pages causing an increase in megabytes downloaded) started coming in from Rogerbot, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A specific example from Rogerbot is as follows: rogerbot/1.1+(http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics#more-help,+rogerbot-crawler+pr2-crawler-104@moz.com) Useragent from the bot IP address: 54.226.73.52 Domain / hostname: ec2-54-226-73-52.compute-1.amazonaws.com Physical location: United States flag United States, VA, Ashburn We've have thought about doing a crawl-delay to prevent these bots from hitting us so hard, but that still doesn't help us answer why this even started in the first place. Any clue on what may be going on here?
Technical SEO | | eTundra0 -
Search Term not appearing in On-Page Grader but is in code?
Hi, I have never had this issue in the past, but I am working on a website currently which is - http://hrfoundations.co.uk I didn't develop this website and the pages are in separate folders on the FTP which I have never come across before but hey ho. Anyway I have added the search term (HR Consultancy West Midlands) to the about us page in the h1, title and description however when I run the On-Page Grader it only says that I have entered it within the body which I haven't even done yet. When I view the page source it has defiantly been uploaded and the search terms are there, I have tried checking the spelling incase I spelt it incorrectly and I still can't seem to find the issue. Has anyone else experience this in the past, I'm going to go away now and check the code for any unclosed divs etc to see if that may be causing any issue's. Thanks Chris
Technical SEO | | chrissmithps0 -
Flatlined traffic starting between April 29 and May 4 2013
One of our clients, an ecommerce shop, has seen a significant drop in their organic traffic and I'm trying to determine whether this was the result of a data refresh or algo update. The site has few inbound links and unfortunately still has a lot of duplicate content on it (manufacturer provided product descriptions). There are also some remaining issues of duplicate page titles that we've been working through. The client has also been writing blogs recently, however there are a number which are relatively short in length. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can start recovering from this?
Technical SEO | | bobbygsy0 -
Status code 404??!
among other things... I'm getting this error: http://worldvoicestudio.com/blog/"http://worldvoicestudio.com/" http://worldvoicestudio.com/blog/"http://worldvoicestudio.com/" Any ideas on how to fix this? many thanks!!
Technical SEO | | malexandro0 -
Starting a new product, should we use new domain or subdomain
I'm working with a company that has a high page rank on it's main domain and is looking to launch a new business / product offering. They are evaluating either creating a subdomain or launching a brand new domain. In either case, their current site will link contextually to the new site. Is there one method that would be better for SEO than the other? The new business / product is related to the main offering, but may appeal to different / new customers. The new business / product does need it's own homepage and will have a different conversion funnel than the existing business.
Technical SEO | | gallantc0