A true SEO professional must have the feeling that they know everything, because SEO is not just about keyword rankings. To be good at SEO, you need to have a systematic understanding of related technologies. Let's analyze the technical skills that a qualified SEOer needs to have.

HTML Basics

To make a website more search engine-friendly, SEOers often modify some of the site's source files. HTML is the most basic code knowledge and is a must-have skill. HTML is quite simple, and there are detailed tutorials and practice software on W3Schools. You can go there to learn and practice more!

DIV+CSS

Search engines now value user experience more, and interface design is the first intuitive impression for users. DIV+CSS is the web design standard and is a layout method for web pages. It is essential knowledge for front-end design. As an SEOer, you don't need to reach the level of a design expert, but you should have a systematic understanding of these concepts. Even if you don't do it yourself, it will help you communicate better with front-end developers when discussing requirements. The best way to learn is to observe and compare, and analyze the styles in the source code of web pages. If you don't understand, just search on Baidu!

Website Building

In general, every SEOer has their own website, so website building skills are essential. Nowadays, it is quite easy and low-cost to build a website in the Internet environment. You don't need to know PHP or write code yourself. Follow the step-by-step tutorials online, and you will quickly learn. There are also various types of free open-source programs for you to choose from. For example, you can use WordPress for personal blogs, Discuz for forums, Zhihuimao or Empire for portal websites, and Wecenter for Q&A platforms. Just use templates!

Server or Virtual Host

If you want to put a website online, you must know how to operate and maintain servers. For example, configuring the environment when going online, monitoring and maintaining the server after going online. You should know that the response time of a website is an important factor affecting keyword rankings. If the website is often inaccessible or takes a long time to load, and the company doesn't have dedicated maintenance personnel, then you will need to take care of these tasks! As for the difference between servers and virtual hosts, you can search for it yourself!

Operational Skills

Regarding operational skills, you should know that SEO is essentially about optimizing web pages. So, the more web pages a website has, the better. And a large number of web pages require corresponding content to fill them. Therefore, SEOers need to have a clear understanding of what kind of content each section needs for operation. Here, let me introduce four common types of content pages for SEO: product pages, news pages, image pages, and tag pages. How to operate these content pages reasonably requires SEOers to layout them according to the company and website situation!

Axure

Axure is a prototyping design software commonly used by product managers. Usually, large companies have product managers, but many companies do not have dedicated product managers to save costs. In this case, if you can operate Axure, you can not only quickly create prototype requirements but also save a lot of communication costs with developers. Even if there is a product manager, being proficient in Axure can also facilitate better communication with them!

These are the six technical points that an SEOer needs to learn and understand.

Dongming, SEO columnist and mentor at XiaoZ blog. WeChat ID: wx5785370, SEO communication group: 68973910.