Why Does SEO Need HTML Knowledge?
If there's one thing that I've seen since I started doing SEO consultancy services is the fact that many are completely ignoring the technical side of their websites. In fact, even if CMS-based, the online portal should have someone with relevant knowledge for what concerns meta titles, descriptions and where keywords should be placed within the backend of the site. Keep in mind that this is JUST BASIC STUFF but you won't imagine how many times this is poorly done.
The Microdata Rant
For us web developers who recently embraced the SEO discipline, microdata has been quite painful to deal with. Although Google recently decided to embrace the Schema.org culture, their implementation for what concerns structured data has been limited to JSON-LD pieces which drastically limits our coding optimisation. Don't get me wrong, the result is what truly matters when it comes to structured data, but Google's policies should be updated, especially on their crawling process.
The Crawling Budget
If you're a web developer who's working with a client who wants SEO, you will definitely have some problems with Javascript and everything that is targeting a website's crawling budget. This has been said in many interviews, webinars, Reddit's AMA and public speakings:
Googlebot is old and it's evolving at an incredibly slow pace. It has been stated, in fact, that the bot is using Chrome 41 to crawl websites, therefore all the newer syntaxes like ES6 are only partially supported. Chrome 64, which is the newest version, should help to keep the bot up to
the pace, but no one knows when it will be released and implemented into the crawling process. With this in mind, it's important to act accordingly in order to understand how your JS sections are performing from an SEO point of view, especially if you are running an e-Commerce store,known for being very JS-heavy. I recently worked with the biggest SEO Agency Manchester currently offers in order to optimise their entire backend, let me know your thoughts!
The Speed Myth
Alright, let's cut this down. HTML and CSS are not impacting your website's loading speed. Javascript does. That's it. Pretty easy and simple to understand and here's why. Given the fact that Googlebot crawling process is based on "Wikipedia-based" pages, it's quite easy to understand how and why these 2 parts are the first ones to be crawled and indexed, the rest is explained in the paragraph above.
To Conclude
Look at your site's backend. Stop using simple editors for your CMS (WP in particular) as they contaminate your site with tons of JS variables which are impacting either the crawling budget and the site's speed. Optimise your HTML and CSS and SEO-wise, you should be alright (from a technical point of view).
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