How Programming Can Help Your SEO

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Everyone has special skills, and it is wise to make use of what you have to get every possible advantage for your business. If you are a writer, make the most out of your writing skills. Write plenty of great articles to attract new visitors and to keep them interested. If you are an artist, use that to make your website visually impressive and outstanding.

In this article, you will learn about some advantages that you have in online business and SEO if you are a programmer (or can hire one).

Easily set up tools and widgets

This is the first obvious advantage that you have. Although WordPress with its numerous widgets is easy to use even for a non-techie, with some programming skills you can fine-tune it for your needs much better.

You can tune the widgets to fit better in your theme, set up some custom tracking, even set up split tests to optimize your business performance. That last item can substantially increase your conversion rates and return on investment.

Create tools and widgets for link baits

Even with minimal scripting skills, you can create simple but powerful online tools for your target market:

• Website, blog or forum ratings. Let your users submit resources and rate them.
• Badges. Reward top performers in your rating with badges that link to your site.
• Online calculators. Is there any popular formula in your field? Something your visitors may want to calculate daily? Help them with an online calculator. Example: Statistical Significance Calculator
• WordPress themes. Create a custom WordPress theme optimized for your target market. Make it available free of charge, in exchange for a small backlink.
• WordPress plugins. Create a useful widget that your visitors may want to add to their blogs. Use it to promote your website and build your brand.

Publish online databases

If you can license or compile a useful database for your target market, you can easily add multiple pages with valuable content to your site. The database will attract visitors for a reference, and each page has a chance to rank well in Google for some terms. Just make sure you have the rights to publish what you have, and provide enough unique content on every page, with unique title and description.

Some examples:

• A list of companies in your industry with contacts and descriptions
• Product lists
• Technical specs for mobile gadgets

Create scripts to collect useful information and statistics

You can program a simple crawler and collect useful information for your visitors from the Internet. Just be careful and follow the network etiquette – obey robots.txt, avoid putting excessive load on other websites, and respect their copyright.

Examples of what information you can collect:

• Who links to whom
• Updates on important sites (you can compile that from RSS, too)
• New important websites in your industry

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. And the best thing is, you don’t even have to be a programmer yourself. You can hire one cheaply on elance.com or vworker.com, and have your project done while you focus on your business development.

Val Danylchuk is the author of Web Tracking Guide – an easy, step-by-step tutorial on tracking and maximizing your online profits. If you liked this article, visit Val’s Web Tracking Blog for more.

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