Any advice on what technical skills are needed to start doing SEO?

Im not an SEO expert but i know a little... firstly a good understanding of how search engines work is good. Eg how keywords, meta tags etc... work and how to register with search engines ( i wrote a tut on this forum about joining google, use the search function) a good understanding of HTML is important because you will need that to make the pages and therefore influence the SEO of the site and a good understanding of web standards is also important.

Im not sure why PHP is in the title of this topic, PHP has little influence in SEO unless you use it to create dynamic pages etc... where the content varies as this can affect what SEO you use on the page and it can bring down its page rank in google if the content is too changeable.

Also a good "ring" of related, high quality websites will help too as google uses links to and from webpages to determine their quality.

so yes some technical skills are needed, not so much programming but more an understanding of the principals and how to influence the rank of the website. If you dont already know it, HTML is a definite necessity for SEO and any website making really. Any SEO done by WYSIWYG editors like frontpage should always be checked and improved by hand.

PHP has nothing to do with SEO, nor any programming skills are required for it.
Here are some basic TIPS.

* Use proper TITLE, META Tags.
* Use ALT Attribute for images.
* Try using valid XHTML & CSS.
* Try using 3-column layout.
* Use Tooltips where ever possible.

Debatable... As i said if you're using PHP to make dynamic content you have to be careful what you do with it. For example there was a topic not so long ago about a PHP script to automatically, and randomly change the website title. but this is very bad for SEO as it is constantly changing and is hard to index in search results etc... so something like that is inadvisable.

but you certainly dont need to learn PHP to use SEO though i would advise HTML and the things posted above.

You don't need any coding language to learn/know seo, but you need to know what coding language is bad for your site.
(not to misinterpret:coding languages aren't bad unless you sue them wrong)

Based on your limited info about your goal (learning seo) I would recommend 'ye ol' Google for help. You'll find some nice tutorials to help you perform better in search engines. Be sure to experiment with all of them and find what is best for your site.

Cheers ^^

Everything seems to just fit in if you have a valid XHTML website. Of course proper meta tags and keywords play a part too, I have received countless visits from search engines who have had people searching for terms related and not related to what I am writing in my blog.