When I first started working on the internet I helped to build website designs in HTML and CSS. This was very much a learn on the job kinda of thing. I found coding quite painful and frustrating at first.
However it has given me valuable insights when carrying out SEO work, and I feel my limited knowledge of coding and how to semantically mark up pages has helped me to be a better SEO.
Throughout my time learning SEO I have tried to soak up as much general knowledge about the web as possible and not restrict myself to learning just about SEO. The reason being that SEO is constantly changing and knowing a little about everything helps out immensely.
In the past few months I have been learning a lot more about code and hacking websites together for no other purpose than to learn new skills. I have always been able to see how things worked in PHP (to some extent) by playing around with WordPress which has lead to me hacking about with MySQL.
I am now on mission to get to grips with PHP more fully, and have been messing around with simple APIs and grabbing data from different types of feeds in XML and JSON formats. I have also started to learn how to pull data from feeds using XPATH and have even knocked up a few tools using XPATH for day to day SEO activites!
I intend to write about my various adventures in code on this blog, incase people are looking to solve similar problems. Where possible I will post up examples of code for other peoples reference. One thing I have found is that often I can’t find the solution or code samples online and that documentation for APIs assume a level of knowledge that some people may not have.
I would recommend anyone working online to play around with some code and at the very least go through the process of setting up a website and having a go at some HTML, I’ve been surprised how fun it can be!
