The world of SEO is always changing. Despite the pillars of SEO remains, the tweaks and updates from search engines has evolve SEO. The field is more integrated with other aspects of online marketing, doesn't require any technical expertise. But more on creativity and strategic thinking.
There's no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn't require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today's SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.
As SEO doesn't require much coding or understanding about algorithms, But with the said skills, they can help. They're necessary but they're not mandatory.
The internet has grown large and the mobile world is occupying more and more traffic on the web. Better website ranking is not always about codes and other technical terms, but more about how well your website give the user experience.
a better user experience is well correlated with better rankings.
Writing Codes As Effort
If you don't know how to code, like for example how to read and write HTML and CSS, it's probably because you're not required to. But the ability in terms of SEO, despite not a necessity, it can be a basic start for you to advance to the next level.
With the ability to read HTML and CSS, you can understand how a web page is suppose to look. You can understand how a web page works by viewing its source code where you can diagnose what's going on in it. The technical thing can make you understand how a website is built, how it's structured, and what's going on behind the scene.
This has been proven to be useful and very helpful. And by advancing to the next level, you can at least understand the principles of software engineering practice and how it's being used on your site.
Quality Contents
Writing quality contents, not matter what the form, is essential for your site to get better rank. From written text, video, images and graphics, podcasts and others.
There are times when your quality contents don't perform as expected. If you see that you have a low bounce rate but still don't rank better, your competitors might have go with the same strategy as yours. With the many quality contents that go within the same niche, the harder for your site to rank.
Your quality content shouldn't just aim for getting more visitors and rank. Your content should be able to convert those visitors into actual buyers, or source of advertising revenue. By putting call-to-action button in appropriate place, and giving sufficient information about what you really want to sell, your content is the gate that opens many possibilities.
User-Experience for a Good Use
The happier your visitors and users are, the more time they'll spend on your site. The more average visit time, the more pages they visit, the higher the chances that they'll become buyers and/or click on your ads. Furthermore, visitors that spend more time on your site can make your site rank higher as well.
User-experience in the form of web design and usability won't affect your authoritative condition. But user-experience can.
Also, frustratingly, this really gets in my craw. I don't think "write quality content" means anything. You tell me. When you hear that, to me that is a totally non-actionable, non-useful phrase that's a piece of advice that is so generic as to be discardable. So I really wish that there was more substance behind that.
The article also makes, in my opinion, the totally inaccurate claim that modern SEO really is reduced to "the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you're going to rank."
Good on-site experience and good contents will make people acknowledge you as an authority. Social media popularity and getting better local relevance will make people better in noticing you.
Rendering and Indexability
Search engines work in mysterious ways but they can be understood. Search engines use crawlers, or bots, to browse and index your site. From your website's structure, your contents, your internal links to your codes.
If you see that your website is not performing well on search engines as expected, you may want to see how Google and others see your site. They may put you on a lower rank because they can't rank you properly. The reasons for this may come from the difficulties they encounter while visiting your site.
You may also disable the crawling and indexing of search engines to your thin or incomplete or non-targeted contents. You can use the robots.txt file to control search engines' crawlers.
Errors on your website, server downtime and not found pages can correlate in making your site rank low. And if your site is multilingual, duplicate contents and such can also affect your ranking.
Further reading: SEO Trends That Always Grow and Never Fade