How to become a technical seo?

digitaljo

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Jan 5, 2017
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Hey guys, come basically from a blogging and writing background. Wanted a sort of career change and recently got interested in seo. I was thinking to start at technical seo but it seems coding knowledge is required. Read a bunch of articles and it leads me more toward that conclusion. Anyone can give me some advice?
 
Start with learning to audit. Technical SEO begins with identifying whether or not the foundation is solid.

For internal signals, ScreamingFrog is your new best friend. Siteliner/Copyscape can help you identify content issues, GTMetrix/Pingdom/Google Pagespeed Insights help with site speed, Webmaster Tools can give you lots of feedback, and your naked eye can spot user experience fails.

This gives you a place to start on all the things you have complete control over. Once those are taken care of, start looking at content organization, content gaps, internal linking, site navigation, and on-page SEO. Again, more ways you can build on fixing what you have complete control over, and builds on the first phase.

Only then would I start looking at external things like outreach, marketing, social, etc.

Just my 2c.
 
Hey thanks for your input, I think at this point i've dived into the deep end and am really trying to learn but doing the audit is one thing but actually diving in and solving the problems really drives me nuts. I'm thinking if its necessary to learn coding to this end.
 
You'll be expected to know HTML & CSS like the back of your hand. You'll need to know your way around Javascript. You'll definitely without question need to be able to deal with PHP. Having a little familiarity with MySQL is going to help. And then you'll need to know about and how to use the functions of whatever CMS you're using. In PHP & MySQL would be the demand for Wordpress, but there are other differing situations with other CMS's, database languages. Some sites are built of Ruby or Python, for instance.

It's a big bite to chew if you have no background in anything like that. You can power through it and learn it, but most of the time people who get into that side of things do it because they've accumulated the experience over time.
 
it does seem like a huge plate, so glad I found this forum at least i can start somewhere!
 
Having some knowledge of programming is pretty much a requirement for SEO. In effect, you operate as a website "mechanic", diagnosing parts that are broken, and fixing them until the car runs smoothly. Can't fix a car if you don't have some form of understanding how the engine works.

In my opinion, one of the most important things you can do to start in SEO, is to decide on a project and BUILD something. Build your own blog, for example. You start with figuring out what the pieces are. Then you figure out how they fit together. Later on, with enough focus, you start finding ways you can manipulate those pieces and squeeze some value out of it.

I can't tell you how many so-called "SEO" people I've known and/or worked with, who have literally never had their own website. It almost always shows in the quality of their work, and the low ROI it delivers. Having that personal investment in it in some manner, is important.
 
Thanks @turbin3 . Have a website running but have never tried to do anything dev related to it other than the out of box set up, will go ahead and try new things. I definitely agree with you that building something is a great way start an seo journey!
 
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