There are many programming languages to learn.
For SEO, the programming language you choose depends on what you plan to do with that language and how you plan to implement changes from that language.
When SEO professionals create programs for SEO, they typically want to do some combination of these four things:
- Make their job easier.
- Create a faster impact by adding automated efficiencies.
- Add a talking point to their resume to help improve their job prospects.
- Become more easily aligned with the engineering team they work with.
That last one is usually the culprit, because SEO pros who don’t have programming knowledge may have a harder time identifying coding issues such as W3C validation problems, and other issues that are not easily exported from a tool.
There is also a debate that rages on in the world of SEO: Does somebody need to be a programmer (or know about programming languages) to learn SEO?
Let’s get the most obvious answer out of the way first: No, you don’t have to know how to program in order to learn SEO.
As a field, SEO is concerned with how well you can achieve rankings for targeted keyword phrases.
And most evaluation points in SEO audits are concerned with things like links, content, keyword optimization, and the like. Coding comes as a distant resolution that is meant to improve the user experience.
But, is it worth it to learn to program for SEO? Absolutely.
In addition to helping you find problems and solutions much quicker, by learning a programming language, there is a myriad of benefits that you add to your skill set.
By working to learn how to program, you do add some significant benefits to your overall skill set, and you also make things much easier from an interdepartmental perspective.
In this article, we’ll look at why SEO pros should learn a programming language and highlight the eight best programming languages to learn for SEO.
Why Should SEO Professionals Learn Programming?
Aside from the ones listed above, there are even more benefits to learning how to program for your SEO career.
Improved Relationships With Web Developers
As SEO experts, it is a job requirement to work with web developers.
After all, they are the ones who are going to implement our recommendations. It’s important to know why they are doing the things they are doing and why they make specific changes.
Knowing the “why” part of this is a significant value-add because it’s another valuable attribute that you can use to work with developer teams better and help make your changes more effective.
You don’t have to learn everything about programming to be on equal footing with developers.
You do, however, want to have a thorough understanding of the things that developers do under the hood so you can ask the important questions and provide SEO recommendations in such a way that will resonate with them.
As a result, you could see greater execution of your recommendations because you