Entrepreneur recently published an article that made the bold declaration that today's marketers don't need to have a strong handle on the technical aspects of SEO when it comes to executing an effective SEO strategy.
I asked our SEO team to weigh in on the stance of the article. (Tl;dr technical expertise still matters.)
Lily Ray, Associate Director of SEO
The fact that we "aren't able to see Google's algorithm in its entirety" is not a sufficient argument that we shouldn't use shared observations and data about the algorithm to try to make predictions about how it works.
Google cares more than ever about proper semantic markup/HTML. This requires having a good handle on web development (not just pretty web design).
Dealing with issues such as handling dynamic URLs, canonicalization, duplicate content, redirects, etc. are crucial to good SEO performance, and all of these require technical expertise
John Morabito, SEO Specialist
Making websites—as easy as CMS's may make it—still requires a reasonable degree of technical knowledge, even if you are using a cookie-cutter theme.
To truly make sure you have EVERY advantage with the coding of your site, you can't rely on theme developers, or Wordpress to watch out for you.
While "have the best website" is GREAT advice, how to get there is a far more complicated matter, one that generally only trained professionals are able to make happen. It's naive to even think that one can wake up one day and be really good at something (SEO, web development, and the like all). Like most things, it take practice to get proficient at something.
If you don't have any insight into how websites or the algos work, then you're constantly stabbing in the dark at what "might" help your site, as opposed to leveraging the experience of professionals who have seen what moves the needle on SEO and what does not.
Mike Levin, SEO Director
After “a good experience and content”, the author lists authority-acknowledgement, social popularity, and local relevance as important factors—all actually linking factors, albeit not traditional web links.
(A link by any other name is a link just the same.)
And using CMS as the final point is just acknowledgement that technical matters do in fact matter. Not every CMS is equal, nor are their default configurations. Want your content to have life in social? Better get those open graph tags perfect so you get a good picture and excerpt when you paste the link into Facebook. This is not something most CMS systems do out-of-the-box.
You’re not going to do too well in the horse race without them, plus dozens of other tiny often overlooked… technical details.
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