Is there any Relationship Between Coding and SEO?

 

8 out of 10 digital marketers across the world wouldn’t hesitate to iterate the phrase ‘Content is King.’ Myth or not is challenging to decide, but it surely isn’t the single most important factor for ranking.

A host of other facets contribute to a website’s prominence on the search engine — backend/frontend programming is one of them.

Consider this; you assign 5 months for high-quality content creation. You publish blogs, get the press releases out, bring in quality backlinks, etc. After 7 months, you sit down for the analysis and note that there’s hardly any significant growth.

What went wrong? Where did you fall off the line? 

But the bigger question is — Were you even on the right path?

Did you resolve technical issues (slow loading time, perhaps)? Did you examine the website’s design for a seamless experience? 

And that’s the catch! Instead, it’s more of a concrete reality. SEO has a lot more to it, especially when it comes to its relationship with Coding. 

Why does SEO require Coding?

In an ideal world, an SEO professional would smoothly work through the conversion pipeline and help the website rank 1st on SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

However, in the real world, a good technical infrastructure would be required to make the most of SEO practices. 

Not to say that SEO professionals must be adept at Coding; they have other equally important jobs to do. 

But programming is essential for the site’s optimization for Google and cross-platform compatibility. 

1. SEO requires Coding to make the indexing easier for the Web Crawlers

It’s is often said that SEO professionals must have a little knowledge about HTML and CSS. 

Well, that’s because tweaking the HTML tags, changing the microdata and improving the website architecture, on the whole, help the search engine algorithms find, comprehend and rank the website faster. 

Most businesses rely on webmasters (website developers) for these purposes, and understandably so.  

2. SEO requires Coding to facilitate a seamless Page Experience for the Users

What is Page Experience? In simple words, it is the perceived experience of the user while interacting with the web page. 

The facilitation of a quality design that could promote hassle-free interaction with the web page is what Google desires. 

Tip: Google desires what the user desires. Work for the user, and you’d automatically impress the search engine. 

A good user experience can only be brought into perspective if the website’s technical front complements the user interface. 

All in all, hiring a proficient web developer is crucial for envisioning success with SEO. 

Coding for SEO (You just CANNOT SKIP this!)

Since SEO and Coding and profoundly interrelated, it is quite obvious that the best practices to complement each other are realised. 

So, whenever a developer heads to address the technical aspects that could influence SEO, he/she must lend time and resources to:

1. Page Speed

Around 37% of the users bounce back from a website if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. 

Naturally, the developer is required to work through the code, make slight changes to the HTML and CSS files, optimize the codes for media, etc. 

For instance, if an image or a video is making the site heavy, the developer must remove them or tweak the tags and reduce the size. 

2. Mobile Optimization

It’s no surprise that mobiles are surpassing desktops in priority when it comes to optimizing for Google. 

After all, almost 58% of all the searches performed on Google source from a mobile. 

Hence, special emphasis has to be laid out on the development of an equal or even better interface for mobiles. 

This entails the developers to program in a way that can help clear visualization over every mobile device. To improve the experience, the popups and page speed have to be addressed.

3. Local SEO

28% of the searches related to a specific location end with a purchase. In all honesty, this is a mind-boggling stat.  

And it brings attention to the optimization of the web page results for the local search queries. 

Thus, in this scenario, programming for SEO turns to the local business schema to help the web crawlers recognize the value one’s local business is providing. 

In a Nutshell

SEO is a massive concept, and its relationship with Coding lays out the framework for the on-page and off-page SEO practices. 

Not only does this relationship shed light on the factors that must be addressed, but it also wards off the myth that content marketing is enough to rank high on Google. 

To be honest, Google takes more than 200 ranking factors into account. Most of these are, in some way or the other, associated with the website’s backend and frontend. 

Simply put, there’s no room for ‘ignorance is bliss.’