Do SEOs Need To Know Coding To Be SEOs?

Apr 10, 2009 - 7:15 am 4 by

A heated Sphinn thread started some controversy in the SEO industry over who is an SEO and who is not an SEO.

In short, Edward Lewis wrote a piece named HTML 4 SEO Best Practices for HTML Authoring. The article goes through many HTML attributes that can come in handy when coding your pages. The article is a very useful resource to hold on to and bookmark, if you need to look up the various elements. So where is the controversy?

Well, when the thread was submitted to Sphinn, Harith titled it "You're not an SEO if you don't know these by heart!" That is where the controversy came in.

Well known SEO, Jill Whalen, said:

Guess I'm not an SEO then because I don't see how most of those have anything to do with SEO.

Now if you're a developer, then yeah--good stuff.

Do you really need to know all these HTML elements to be considered an SEO? I know many people who consider themselves SEO, but know very limited HTML and coding. Of course, it helps a lot to be fully skilled in HTML, and other web languages, but is it necessary?

Here is a poll, do you need coding skills to be considered an SEO?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 10th.

 

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