This morning I was looking at a blog article by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame about ways to learn SEO basics (6 Ways to Learn SEO). The articles including links to various free resources, several blogs if not dedicated to, at least heavy in content about Search Engine Optimisation.
Always keen to learn about SEO (I can never really get enough of this stuff). I followed on of the links to a SEO beginners checklist by Danny Dover.
This is great checklist and I thoroughly recommend it. One of his first recommendations shook me (a little), he recommended building a site using code (HyperText Markup Language, HTML). Many of you are probably like me, we got hosting and then used Simple Scripts to install WordPress and maybe used an FTP program like Filezilla to load up some .php files. Building a site using just code (and an HTML editor) just seems out of our league and a little, well, elitist.
Now, I have a confession – if you look behind me or at my e-book library you’ll find I have an HTML Reference book, a copy of Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, and downloads from the HTML Dog website, plus some well-thumbed (well clicked) bookmarks to the W3Schools website (probably one of the neatest and simplest online HTML, CSS school online). So hands up, I am a little geeky and was sort of excited by Danny’s challenge. So I had no qualms about learning HTML (although building an entire site seemed a little too involved and time-consuming).
Do I Really Need to Build a Car Before I Drive One
So is the suggestion that you need to learn HTML as fundamental to becoming good at SEO anachronistic. Tantamount to suggesting that before you can drive a car you need to build one?
My answer is a nerdy no – well not completely. I tend to agree with Danny’s underlying message that being effective online means understanding the online language. You may not ever want to check out the source code and to be honest if you are online to blog and share with friends, that’s cool. WordPress also has a huge number of free themes which you can either install and start using or have user-friendly widgets and settings that allow you to modify and customise a site to meet your requirements – without you needing to use HTML, edit a style sheet or even understand what a tag is.
If You’re Going to Make Your Living Driving At Least Learn How to Change the Oil
If you are serious about internet marketing however, familiarity with HTML is a must. Partly because you will see it in the literature – even simple SEO talks about H1 tags, nofollow and robot.txt. Knowing the language is important not only from the point of understanding and accessbility. To take my car analogy a little further, while you don’t need to build a car, if you going to make your living driving, at least learn to change the oil.
More importantly it is about managing fear: familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds confidence. Check out W3Schools and you’ll be surprised at how simple HTML can be.
So, take a moment, learn a little HTML and find out what all this talk about CSS is. Now if someone could just explain .php to me…
No related posts.
