Ok I am already doing a little rant post even before I have bothered to change the theme of my blog, install any plug-ins or just do anything in general.
This morning I had a phone call off an old acquaintance that I did the occasional bit of work for but because of work commitments I could never handle the work he wanted doing. Since then he has been to 2 other SEOs and both times he has come back asking for advice on problems.
The main problem is that the web-site is made in ASP.NET and according to him he cant find an SEO that does ASP.NET. Now, I realise ASP and .NET are not always the most search engine friendly of languages due to you not being able to use the ever so handy mod_rewrite. I also understand that you can’t expect an SEO to be a programming genius in multiple languages. Hell I am not even an expert in ANY language (even my native English!) but I am sorry if you are going to try and pass yourself off as an SEO you need to be able to have a grasp of programming.
Ok, now I realise there are some people lucky enough to specialise in a specific area because they are very good, and therefore it is probably acceptable to not know how to do things not in your niche. However for a generic SEO consultant I do think you need to be a bit of jack of all trades and if you can code in one language and have a basic grasp of programming in general you should be able to transfer them skills to other languages. I am not talking about coding a site from the ground up either. The examples from this acquaintance included:
- The SEO creating flat HTM pages but then leaving server side code at the language declaration and imports at the top of the page!
- The SEO not being able to turn a dynamically generated product name into a link to that product even though the was already there but for a “Read More” button
- The SEO not being able to dynamically change the title of the page based on the product / category.
I am sorry but the above 3 issues should be easy to handle, ANYONE that deals with HTML etc should know the difference between HTML and server side code. With the 2 programming issues above the code is nearly always already there for you, you just need to alter it a little!
I am personally weaker at PHP. I know it is shocking. As we are all probably aware PHP is very popular and therefore I have to frequently change code in it, yes it probably takes me longer as I sometimes have to look up guides on the net or experiment with the code but it is not impossible and I think most/every SEO should be able to dabble with any code when necessary!
