SEO Essentials

Intensive 1-day Basic/beginners SEO Training Course — SEE

SEO Training Course Overview

This SEO training course covers the absolute essentials of search engine optimisation, i.e.

  • How search engines gather data about your website
  • How Google, Bing, et al. analyse users' search queries
  • How search engines match queries to web pages in search results
  • How search engines rank natural search results
  • How users respond to search engine results pages (SERPs)
  • How to analyse and evaluate your competitive search position
  • How to identify your SEO priorities
  • How to construct landing pages and SEO-friendly web sites

This is the shorter, and much more intensive, of our two SEO beginners courses. It is best suited to those who already know a little bit about SEO and web design, i.e. those who are confident that they can manage without a lot of detailed discussion and exercises using real-world examples from their own websites. We recommend our 2-day SEO Fundamentals course for those absolute beginners who need a gentler and more complete introduction to SEO.

That said, many absolute beginners have used this SEO course to build successful online businesses, including several who have gone on to become SEO consultants in their own right.

Our principal trainer, Dave Fisher, first taught this course in the mid-1990s and it has been continually evolving and updated ever since. The current version was last updated in early 2019.

Course contents — 1 Myths & misconceptions

  • Seo equals web visibility
  • Copywriting goals are universal
  • The homepage is the first page
  • Meta tags increase search engine position
  • Inbound links good; outbound bad
  • You can cheat the system
  • Build then promote
  • Wrong site objects/priorities
  • Specialism-based workflow
  • Forgetting 'the medium is the message'
  • Market competitor is SERPs competitor
  • 'fire and forget' content authorship
  • Obstructing search engine robots
  • Obstructing search engine content analysis
  • Checklist search engine optimisation
  • Search engines rank sites
  • Search engines rank pages
  • Pages are ranked by keyword
  • Conclusion: content is king

Course contents — 2 How search engines work

  • Introduction
  • Search engine aims and objectives
  • Search engine needs and requirements
  • Match site objects to SE requirements
  • How search engines discover new pages
  • How search engine robots gather data
  • Obstacles to robot data gathering
  • How search engines analyse page content
  • How search engines evaluate keyword places
  • How search engines gather user interests
  • How search engines analyse user interests
  • Evaluating matches before rank
  • Negative page ranking criteria
  • Positive page ranking criteria
  • How search engines evaluate link sources
  • How search engines evaluate link content

Course contents — 3 Competition analysis

  • Id & analyse key search expressions
  • Example: search expression components
  • Rank search expressions by probability
  • Id top pages per search expression
  • Count occurrences in ranking pages
  • Weight occurrences in ranking pages
  • Compare cumulative content scores
  • Id & count in-bound links to pages
  • Weight link values
  • Compare cumulative link values
  • Evaluate link scores & content scores
  • Identify key success factors per term
  • Strength, weakness, opportunity, threat

Course contents — 4 SEO strategy

  • Introduction
  • Priority: show-stoppers & low hanging fruit
  • Acquire and deploy skills
  • Acquire and deploy tools
  • Generate enough good content
  • Focus content
  • Focus links and site structure
  • Present content better via mark-up
  • Present content better via writing style
  • Collect & use performance data
  • Experiment and test
  • Target and prioritise link providers
  • Improve link quality
  • Concluding comments

Dates for Online courses

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Course Objectives

On completion of this SEO training course, you will be able to:

  • Understand how search engines find and use your web site content
  • Understand how prospective customers find and use your content
  • Identify your SEO strengths, weaknesses and opportunities
  • Distinguish SEO competitors from business competitors
  • Identify your SEO competitors' strengths and weakness
  • Identify which SEO strategies and tactics best suit your needs
  • Begin implementing a credible SEO strategy
  • Evaluate your SEO strategy outcomes, including return on investment (ROI)
  • Progressively improve your SEO tactics and results

Target Audience

  • Marketing staff
  • Web content authors
  • Web designers
  • Web developers with SEO responsibilities

Training Pre-requisites

  • Basic computer literacy
  • Basic web literacy

Technical knowledge of web fundamentals (e.g. HTML and CSS) is not required — but having those skills will enrich your experience of this course, and enhance the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

In the long-run, we recommend that non-technical marketeers, content authors and designers all learn some basic HTML (and possibly CSS) if they really want to do SEO properly.

Don't let the snake-oil merchants kid you, if you want a real edge over your principal SEO competitors, acquiring these skills is one of the quickest ways to get one — much cheaper and more effective than many self-styled 'SEO consultants'.

Training Style

This SEO training course is tightly focused on the practical steps you can take to improve your position in search engine results pages.

Even with the diversity of sites and businesses represented on publicly scheduled versions of this course, we can offer hands-on exercises analysing and evaluating your competitive SEO position — since these steps are, essentially, the same for most businesses.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for devising and implementing an SEO strategy — since every organisation's business constraints are unique, and implementing good SEO is entirely about devising a unique strategy for those unique circumstances.

Those who want hands-on exercises and support in the design and implementation phases, may want to consider 3 (non-exclusive) alternatives:

  • Our 2-day SEO Fundamentals course, covering the same ground, but in much greater depth, with practical exercises on implementing a performance improvement stategy, and greater focus on your individual site
  • Take a private (in-house) version of this course — i.e. one tailored specifically to your business
  • Hire one of our SEO consultants to work exclusively with your business

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