Write a Website from Scratch in Notepad

With all the free Website design tools availble today most people never bother learning to write HTML code. If you're practicing search engine optimization, however, you should really learn how HTML works. The search engines look at all sorts of "under the hood" stuff that may break for any number of reasons.

You can toggle plugins on and off all day long but if you don't know where the HTML code is breaking you cannot tell your developers what needs to be fixed. A simple "View Source" sometimes reveals the simplest and easiest SEO mistakes.

For example, many people who put shopping carts on their Websites don't know they should always use ABSOLUTE, FULLY-RESOLVED URLs in their internal links. This is because their shopping carts are hosted on their secure (HTTPS) servers and the rest of their sites are hosted on their unsecure (HTTP) servers. When you use RELATIVE URLs in your internal links you may create links to non-existing content on the wrong server.

Although this is a common problem, if you don't know how links work in HTML you could look at the code and not realize that the links are creating problems.

Another reason to learn HTML is that HTML is always evolving and the rules change. For instance, people have been doing certain things for years in HTML 4 Website design that is no longer supported in HTML 5. If a Website is experiencing problems (and those problems are affecting search indexing) then it could be that someone broke the HTML 5 by including non-compliant code.

In addition to learning how to code a Website by hand you gain a familiarity with the types of elements that are included in basic Website design. You learn that HTML tables are really not bad things after all, that Cascading Style Sheets can be both ugly and crude, and that truly elegant Website design uses every HTML feature appropriately and not simply in a misguided effort to avoid using some other feature.

Bad coding can easily get out of hand when it is generated by plugins, site design tools, and other resources that people use to build Websites. The day of the HTML geek is not over. It's still a very important skill to have, and given how much HTML affects search engines a good SEO should know as much about HTML as possible.

Add some basic Web server management skill and you will begin to be a well-rounded SEO technician. You should be able to read server log files, understand and modify .htaccess files, and configure password protection for directories. If you cannot do these things you still have a few technical SEO skills to acquire.

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