Monthly Archives: August 2011

Why code?

I wish I had a pound for every time another SEO told me they want to learn a programming language. It seems most SEOs are sure they want to learn PHP, Python or another programming language, but when asked the question “to what end?” the answers generally become less clear.

Because of this I think the following is the reason why a lot of SEOs never end up taking that step:

Let’s face it: teaching yourself a new language is never easy, and it becomes much harder if you don’t actually know why you’re doing it. For this reason most people get frustrated and give up before they hit the red line above and get any significant payoff for investing the time in learning a new language.

When I taught myself Perl it wasn’t directly to do with SEO – in my first job I spent a whole day each week manually editing an HTML newsletter template in Notepad++. I hated it so much I figured there was probably a better way do it so I bought an O’Reilly book, got up 2 hours early every day until I knew the basics and could build a tool to generate the HTML for me. That saved me 5 hours a week of boring tasks and got me nicely into the payoff zone.

What’s your imperative?

The Real Link Wheel

Link development doesn’t exist in a silo. Sometimes I think the following gets lost in translation in the client/agency relationship:

Both us agencies and the SEO industry as a whole are guilty of propagating the perception you can do really great link development without the support of a good website to support it by offering separate link building/development packages.

In this context I’m thinking of link “development” as being distinct from link “building”; the former is about developing relationships, getting gold standard links, the latter about building links for the sake of short term rankings or hitting an arbitrary target of quantity of links.

Some people get confused by cliches such as “content is king” and “if you build it well, they will come” (interpreting that to mean they don’t need to engage in SEO), because they haven’t got all three of these elements working together in harmony.

If all three are truly in harmony (arguably very rare without SEO advice), perhaps you don’t need SEO for your company?

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