SEO tips for people that can’t (or won’t) code

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Oct 2, 2020 / by
SEO tips for people that can’t (or won’t) code

Given the fact that it’s something which, at its heart, involves a lot of code, many people assume that you need to understand coding to get into SEO. That isn’t necessarily the case though. Whilst a decent knowledge of coding (particularly HTML) certainly won’t go amiss, it’s by no means essential and an absence of coding skill shouldn’t be seen as a barrier to your SEO success.

There is a wealth of tools that can help you with the basic aspects of SEO that do all the fiddly coding work for you, essentially cutting out the digital middleman. So, there’s really no good excuse why your site shouldn’t at least be SEO-friendly, as long as you know the right software to use and follow the tips below.

Schema Generators

As Google continues to lean further and further towards more mobile-friendly, snippets and voice search, the importance of schema tags in parallel. These are the pieces of code that help the search engine return richer information about your page and helps it understand and index it more effectively. This is always going to result in higher rankings and more clicks. Sites without schema markups simply don’t get the same results.

Thankfully, the days of having to manually insert schemas are far behind us. Schema generators like Google’s very own Structured Data Helper let you visually tag elements on your page. If you fancy generating code that you could always doctor (or learn from) later, meanwhile, the rather straightforwardly named Schema Markup Generator creates schema-tagged code that you can simply copy and paste into the HTML of your site. No coding required.

XML Sitemap Generators

A sitemap might seem like it shouldn’t be important for SEO purposes but look at it from the perspective of Google’s algorithm: If it’s struggling to crawl your site then it might simply give up and leave some pages unindexed. Conversely, if you can make the crawling experience easier for it, you’ll get more pages indexed and ranking higher. Everybody wins!

To create an XML sitemap without having to bother with any of that nasty coding, there are numerous resources but we’d recommend Screaming Frog. If you’re on WordPress, meanwhile, the Yoast SEO plugin should do the same thing. Once you have your sitemap, submit it to the Google Search Console and it will give your pages a good thorough crawl.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file lives at the root of your site and exists to tell search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request. The files are so named as they tell the robots (crawlers) which pages to focus on and indexing and without a robot.txt file, Google is going to treat every page as fair game and index sensitive pages that you might not want to be made that public, particularly if you’re continually improving them.

It’s a file that allows you to call the shots when it comes to the sites you want to be crawled and indexed and there are tonnes of robot.txt generators to use online. Internet Marketing Ninjas, for example, have a robots.txt generator tool that’s free to use.

Content Optimisation

Finally, there are even tools available that take care of the way your site is optimised for SEO, cutting out a lot of the legwork. This includes factors like keyword density and placement to readability scores and everything in-between.

Yoast SEO is once again invaluable here for WordPress users. For everyone else, SEMRush is always a good shout.