Search engine optimization is about marketing. But you must not forget that SEO has always been technical. Our world is changing fast. There are certainly a lot of predictions about how this industry will be in the near future. Only a few years ago, mobile or mobile SEO was the big thing. You cannot simply isolate a problem within search engine optimization.
Machine learning has to become a big part of how many things are going to work. We, the people, are entering a world where many more things are going to be in their automation mode, and the decisions are made by machine based on some machine learned algorithms. For Google, it has to apply start applying more and more through machine learning. This can make Google’s search algorithms much less obvious to most the marketers (and/or even some SEO professionals). It is going to be more difficult for some of us to take on SEO as a project. Every problem is becoming more and more interlinked with other problems.
We can categorize technical SEO into four main types. The different levels of technical SEO guys can solve different levels of SEO issues.
The First Type: Checklist Technical SEO with a Checklist
The checklist technical SEO consists of items about crawling and indexing. As a marketer (or most of the time a technical SEO person), you utilize tools to get most of it. The tools can help you with identifying problems and compiling reports as site audit results. The bottom line is that when you are unable to fix the issues (i.e. the basic issues), your website is going to get a dent from organic search ranking.
The Second Type: Technical SEO in General
This involves crawling, indexing and rendering of web pages. But the problems you are facing are more difficult then checklist technical SEO. You can still utilize from tools, but not 100%. You need higher skills and more evaluation to figure out the pictures behind the interconnected systems. For example, you may have to find a bug in your website CMS that slows down the crawling of web pages. You cannot really automate that.
The Third Type: Technical SEO in the Blurred Areas
The items in the blurred areas often fall into the hands of an SEO person. The problem is that the items aren’t really related directly to SEO, but are rather supplemental. When you pass these items to your frontend web developer or the user experience guy, it is first nature for them to fix with ease. The items may include optimizing page speed web performance, or sophisticated analytics implementation. Unfortunately, many companies would expect the SEO guy to cover and fix these issues.
The Fourth Type: Programming Technical SEO
This is advanced search engine optimization stuffs. The technical skills that are required for this type of SEO involves programming. The SEO guy is expected to fill in the programmer role i.e. He may have to be creative and at the same time be a data scientist in order to solve the technical assessment problems. The problems he faces are not necessarily only about crawling or indexing. He may be required to implement a content creation algorithm/system that can process natural languages.
