I'm considerig taking an Intro To Programming course.

here's my thinking:

I've been noticing more and more lately, I'm into server-based or coding based solutions for SEO work.

That said, I'm a marketing guy whose tech savy, not a programmer who knows SEO.

is it a worthwhile use of time to take a course such as an intro to Programming to help me better understand that side of things? Or maybe look for a SysAdmin-type course?

I realize many of you might not be programmers, but still know this stuff, but as someone who seems to struggle (I feel I do, anyway) with some of the more technical angles of proper SEO work, I think there's value.

that said, I have no idea which direction I SHOULD look in...

Incidentally - anyone ever hear of this SEO training program:

SEOToolSet - link

They seem to talk the talk, and given some of the associated names, I think they know their stuff, but man, I'd have to pop a LOT of cash AND travel to Cali - is it really worthwhile...?

I am self-tought off the forums, and by doing it...


I Google for a tutorial if I need to know the fine detail of a solution.

That's pretty much where I am, but I'm always after more training and we have th ebudget. just trying to figure out if it's actually going to add to my toolbox...or am I just going to learn stuff I already know...

What you have to absolutely avoid is someone who teaches you "how to do Microsoft stuff", as while that stuff can be incredibly powerful it is usually very search engine unfriendly.

sportsguy, this totally depends on what you're really focused on, what your skills are. For example, I can't market my way out of a wet paper bag, I can barely design. So I don't pretend I can do those things, since if I try, what I will do will just be sort of mediocre at best.

You're completely right that the deeper you get into website construction, the more programming you will do. Every major site you see on the web does not exist in static form before the page is requested, they are almost all fully dynamic.

Trying to create sites commmercially without programming is handicapping yourself fairly majorly.

But learning how to do this programming in a reasonably affective way is not easy, it's not trivial, and it takes a certain skillset, and mindset, to be able to do it decently well.

While g1msd tends to believe that everyone out there can learn as easily and as independently as he has, I don't believe that this is the case. I find that people who are going to be good at programming are generally drawn to programming as a fairly natural progression, just like anything else. For example, I am not drawn to marketing.

So the thing of taking a class, yes, definitely, it helps. A high quality programming class can teach you how to be a software engineer, it can help you avoid basic beginner errors, and help shape correct programming procedures that will benefit you your entire productive programming life. That's a good class. A bad class is a waste of time. It all depends on the teacher. And on you.

or am I just going to learn stuff I already know...

this depends on what you know, here's a list of things a decent programming class would teach you, see how many you know:

1. how to use if statements
2. how to use elseif extensions to if statements
3. how to use switch/case statements
4. how to do loops:
4a. while...
4b. for...
5. how to use arrays
5a. simple one dimensional arrays
5b. multidimensional arrays
5c. more complex arrays, array indexes
5d. packing arrays
5e. unpacking arrays
5f. looping through arrays

6. constructing functions
7. function parameters
8. variables, static, global, local

and so on. That would be a good beginning programming class I'd say.

That doesn't touch on what most modern sites use, database programming, regular expression processing, sessions, program optimization, templating, objects, classes, and all that. And, most important for web stuff, security of the code and site. That is not trivial.

On the brighter side, any good programming class will teach skills that are highly transferable, with the exception in my opinion of MS stuff, but even there the basic logic is the same, there are just lots of specific methods and objects

Thanks for the feedback guys.

I'm leaning towards a programming class over the SEO stuff. I'm a little concerned I'll take the SEO course and be sitting there wondering why I wasted the money, as I probably either already know 50%+ of it, or have access to it quickly thorugh text books, forums, etc.

That said, if they'd just share some of the exam questions, I'd know if it's worthwhile.

There is a heavy focus on using "their" seo tools, so that's a put-off right away for me. Nice to get the training, but if it's specific to one set of tools, I doubt it's very objective...

Now when it comes to SEO, I'm 100% agreeing with g1smd, read the forums, a few different ones, play, experiment. I get all my seo knowledge from a combination of forums and private communications with seos, who I've met on forums, plus tons of real world testing and experimentation. The real stuff happens behind the scenes though. It does not appear in books.

I can tell you this: no matter what people may tell you about clean html/css sites not ranking, they do. I don't care what others say on this, I see it happen every time I convert a site.

The reason people think they don't rank is because poorly done html keeps ranking. But that's not the point, the point is that clean html /css tends to rank better for the SAME site. Ignore the sites around yours, raise yours above them by using superior methods. It works.

I'd never pay for an seo class, why would someone who knows seo teach it, they can make more money in the real world. Dugh. If you are good seo then you make good money, much much more than you would make teaching. If you are a mediocre seo you will probably make more money teaching.

Same goes for programming teachers by the way. But programming is such a burn out, and the skills really do not change very much, it's not like seo where you have to spend all this time several times a year learning the latest updates and hacks. Programming is logic, and the better at it you get, the better you are. It's almost the opposite of seo in many ways.

That logic can be taught, since it's logic. There are known good and bad ways to program. A good program is easy to read, and maintain. A bad program, no matter how brilliant it may be, is still bad if nobody can decipher it. I have a fantastic script, powerful, but absolutely incomprehensible even to myself, who wrote it. This is not a good program, although it's very cool. Programming classes teach you how to write good programs.

Most php and asp programmers are VERY VERY BAD programmers. Their scripts totally suck. That's because they didn't learn the discipline of programming, but just started hacking.

Re programming classes: there's no point in taking a class that is theoretical. Programming is empirical, things work or they don't work. Then you debug. Then you debug some more.

If you aren't programming almost immediatately in the class you are wasting your time.

You can read about loops all you want, but you're still going to write one and forget to increment the loop counter and then execute it, then have to either reboot or kill the browser as it spins endlessly out of control. And you're still going to forget to end an if, or miss a ;, or make a commenting error.

>> Their scripts totally suck. That's because they didn't learn the discipline of programming, but just started hacking. <<

Heh, most webdesigners are like that too... random tag soup that sort-of renders in some browsers.

Tidying the code up; yes, every time I have done that, the page has gained a lot of positions.

[link]

Learning the programming side would be valuable in helping you interact with client programmers.

Especially if the client site has a large number of pages. I worked on a large site that needed 2,000+ optimized. The only practical method was to optimize a few templates that their programmer could plug in the various data and content.

Most programmer that have a steady day job, really are proficient. Often times I would ask the programmers, "This is what we need. This is the problem. Is there an automated solution?"

And every time they would get back to me with a quick and inexpensive solution. That made me happy, and it certainly made the client happy!

YW - that's exactly my reason for wanting to better understand the programming side of htings. We have about 35 inhouse programmers - I'd liek to be able to speak their language, or at least better understand their side of MY work before I start saying "do this" & "do that".

They always look for the quickest way to the result - soemtimes that doesn't work for my needs...

I tend to agree with yellowwing and others here. You can benefit greatly from understanding programming, even if you never intend to write production code.

At the very least, you begin to understand the difference between a 12 minute fix and a 12 day project when discussing alternatives with your programmers. You also know when they are sand-bagging you.

I have always been a proponent of a more unified concept for Web Development whereby everybody from the marketers to the core programmers possess at least some working knowledge about what the rest of the people on the project are doing.

It creates better results, faster and for less expense. Disconnected "tasking" and prolific outsourcing is sometimes a cocktail for disaster because none of the critical contributors has a clue about anything other than their own discipline.

What do you mean by "how to do microsoft stuff"? Could you be more specific. What microsoft stuff is search engine friendly or unfriendly?
Thank you.

Its pretty much all unfriendly in any way you could imagine, from server technology to programming and scripting to browser technology: lots of flaws.

I wouldn't say I know my stuff, but I've been learnign from here and various places and w3schools.com, good site, everything is w3 friendly as well

Good luck in whatever you choose

I don't se how all of it can be completely unfriendly. Errors and flows can be fixed and I was under the impression that if a site passes w3c validation, it can be spidered. Am I wrong?

P.S. w3schools.com is a good site. Lots of useful info.

Y

"I don't se how all of it can be completely unfriendly. Errors and flows can be fixed and I was under the impression that if a site passes w3c validation, it can be spidered. Am I wrong?"

I don't agree with g1smd here, in that you can provide SE friendly sites using MSFT technology. It takes work, no doubt, but it takes work no matter what platform you are working with. I would be interested in hearing g1smd expand on his examples, maybe there is something I am missing.

Server tech: IIS serves pages just as well as Apache, not sure what could be different here...

Server side scripting & programming: last I checked, IIS supports PHP, Perl, Python, as well as ASP and .NET, and sites driven by ASP or .NET can be SEO'd.

Client side scripting: didn't even realize this was connected to SEO...?

Firstly, IIS isn't case sensitive, so if you (or other people) link to your page.html as Page.Html or Page.HTML or whatever, then Google thinks you have many different pages all with the same content, duplicate content, and will list one and will URL-only, supplemental, or not list the others. The one listed, may not be the one you want listed, and your PR suffers for it. Apache is case sensitive and completely avoids the problem.

Apache makes it easy to redirect non-www to www to avoid another way of serving duplicate content. IIS makes this much more difficult. You need an add-on that most hosters have not even heard of and are much less willing to supply.

MS products produce bloated tag soup, and uses proprietory non-standard tags and attributes. Usage of shared borders and Microsoft themes bloats things even further. Select XHTML output and your file will be 90% code and 10% content.

MS enterprise solutions, the sort of stuff that local goverments might use, serve content using the most horrendous URL imaginable: search engine non-friendly in the extreme: http://www.domain.com/AFRE/AFREdocument.nsf/
Page?ReadForm&Section=/AFRE/publications.nsf/(ID)/select/
0473894B3EB04E22C45570DD115B0EBC?opendocument/view.document/
F5431734D727459515A4FE72AC99A034/page/ is somewhat typical.

I could go on...





Server side scripting is very connected to SEO: the script needs to serve a unique title and meta description for each page, and that needs to be designed in from the beginning. For any URLs in links the parameters need to be in the exact same order across the whole site. Each page of content should be accessible through only one canonical URL, all others should serve 404. Scripts should catch non-valid URLs and serve 404 and not (as many do) a 302 redirect to an error message.

So far as choosing between ASP and PHP, you might want to read this brief over at devwebpro: [link]

The differences between Microsoft's IIS and Open Source's Apache are well documented out there too. They are completely different animals. Unless you're planning to work for an entrenched Fortune 500 company sometime soon, I suggest you focus your programming effort and training upon the LAMP (Linux[Unix], Apache, MySQL, PHP) combination.

The whole environment is easier, faster, more popular, totally free and better supported by a worldwide developer community. What more do you want?

Did I see mySQL beating "professional" database servers in some test measurements recently?

g1smd:

Yes, you did. I did too. Oracle and SBC are both losing stock in "system integration" software and their whole sales pitch because companies are finding that other "enterprize solutions" like LAMP can satisfy all their business needs without having to rely upon extremely expensive, proprietary, expensive, incompatible, expensive, in-house, expensive, caveat emptor, expensive, secret, expensive, anal-retentive, expensive predictable software.

Remember when Digital Corp. - who were the King-Hell 128 bit avant-garde, Defense Department gurus for years - got bought out by Compaq? Compaq? The same PC people who sell $500.00 PCs? It's true.

But it occurs to me that the jargon just goes on and on. How can anyone make a legitimate recommendation about what to study or how to encourage a person to devote their time and understanding toward ANY language, platform, method or SE presentation without knowing the scope, depth and requirements of a project? It is literally academic. That's why most cyber-educators and their schemes are failures.

These forums are more infomative than instructors are. Everybody has 1000 code snippets stored away in remote, forgotten folders somewhere.

I'm not about to get into some highly opinionated discussion here about who does what best. Whatever. I don't care if people want to write Python all day long (which is a good thing), but you certainly won't see me discourage anyone from pursuing anything they seem to think important at the time...

My baseline is: Study what you want, do the best you can and always keep your options open if you lose interest in what you're doing. Having read my own advice, I'm not sure it makes sense or works either, for that matter.