SEO Fundamentals
In-depth 2-day Basic/beginners SEO Training Course — SEF
SEO Training Course Overview
Basic SEO training for beginners, which covers similar material to our SEO Essentials course. The key differences are, that this version of the course provides extra time and a maximum class size of 5. It can, therefore, provide:
- More practical SEO exercises focusing on each delegate's own site
- In-depth exploration of SEO concepts and issues
- In-depth competitor analysis of each delegate's site
The content of this SEO training course is as follows:
- How Google, Bing, et al. collect data about your site
- How search engines analyse user search expressions
- How they fit those expressions to results (SERPs)
- How search engines rank organic search results
- How users interact with search results pages
- How to analyse and evaluate your competitors
- How to specify and rank your SEO priorities
- How to write, structure and markup landing pages
Course contents — 1 SEO myths & misconceptions
- SEO is web visibility
- Copywriting is SEO copywriting
- Visits start on homepages
- Meta tags affect SERPs rank
- Outbound links are bad or don't count
- You can cheat and get away with it
- Build first then promote
- Workflow based on professional specialisms
- Forgetting the medium is the message
- Business competitors vs. SEO competitors
- 'Fire and forget' copywriting
- Blocking search engine bots, content analysis
- SERPs rank sites and pages
- SERPs rank pages by keyword
- Conclusion: content is still king
Course contents — 2 How search engines work
- Search engines' business goals
- Search engines' data requirements
- Site goal: meet those requirements
- Discovery: how search engines find pages
- How search engine bots collect data
- Obstacles to Robot Data Gathering
- Search engine content analysis
- How page landmarks are valued
- How search engines collect user data
- How search engines evaluate user interests
- Matching search expressions vs. ranking pages
- Negative ranking criteria
- Positive ranking criteria
- Link source values
- Link content values
Course contents — 3 Competition Analysis
- ID, analyse, evaluate keyword targets
- E.g. ID structure/components of expressions
- Evaulate relative probability of expression use
- ID top pages per expression
- Measuring the occurrence of expressions
- Weigh/evaluate expression by context
- ID & count inbound links
- Weight/evaluate link sources
- Weight/evaluate link content
- Quantifying combined/cumulative factors
- Identify critical success factors per term
- SWOT analysis of risks and opportunities
- SWOT analysis per search term
- Hypothesise winning strategies
- By target keyword and per competitor
Course contents — 4 Improving your SEO position
- Show-stoppers & low hanging fruit
- Skills requirements
- SEO tools — develop your own?
- Generating content — that's good enough
- Content value, copywriting and editing
- Focus & structure content
- Focus & structure links
- Semantic mark-up and metadata
- Monitor & use performance data
- Experiment and test
- Target and prioritise
- Quality vs. quantity & scale
Dates for Online courses
Dates for London
- Monday 15 Sep 2025 Barbican £850 Book
- Monday 20 Oct 2025 Barbican £850 Book
- Monday 24 Nov 2025 Barbican £850 Book
Dates for Manchester
- Tuesday 16 Sep 2025 Albert Square £850 Book
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 Albert Square £750 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 Albert Square £750 Book
Dates for Leeds
- Tuesday 16 Sep 2025 Radisson £850 Book
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 Radisson £750 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 Radisson £750 Book
Dates for Glasgow
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 Ingram St. £850 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 Ingram St. £850 Book
- Tuesday 16 Dec 2025 Ingram St. £850 Book
Dates for Birmingham
- Tuesday 16 Sep 2025 Somerset House £850 Book
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 Somerset House £850 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 Somerset House £850 Book
Dates for Edinburgh
- Tuesday 16 Sep 2025 St Andrew Square £850 Book
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 St Andrew Square £850 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 St Andrew Square £850 Book
Dates for Newcastle
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 Clavering Hse £850 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 Clavering Hse £850 Book
- Tuesday 16 Dec 2025 Clavering Hse £850 Book
Dates for Bristol
- Tuesday 21 Oct 2025 The Waterfront £850 Book
- Tuesday 25 Nov 2025 The Waterfront £850 Book
- Tuesday 16 Dec 2025 The Waterfront £850 Book
Course Objectives
On completion of this SEO training course, you will be able to:
- Understand how Google gathers/manipulates your content
- Understand how protential customers find your services
- Identify your basic SEO threats and 'low hanging fruit'
- Distinguish business competition from SEO competitors
- Locate your SEO competitors' basic weaknesses
- Distinguish generic SEO tactics from those that work for you
- Scope a credible SEO strategy for your site
- Measure and evaluate your basic SEO performance (ROI)
- Refine your SEO tactics and strategy in the light of results
Target Audience
- Marketing staff
- Web content authors
- Web designers
- Web developers with SEO responsibilities
Training Pre-requisites
- Basic computer literacy
- Basic web literacy
A technical understanding of web design fundamentals, like HTML or CSS, is not a requirement of this SEO course — but having that will enhance your experience of this course and improve your SEO skills.
Ultimately, we strongly recommend that any non-technical marketeer, content copywriter or designer should learn some basic HTML+CSS if they really want to become an expert SEO practitioner.
Don't let the advertising and copywriting snake-oil merchants mislead you. If you really want to beat SEO competitors, acquiring technical skills is perhaps the quickest and cheapest way to do so — much more cost-effective than most self-styled 'SEO consultants'.
Training Style
This SEO course concentrates on the practical steps you need to take in order to improve your position in SERPs.
This longer version of our basic/beginners SEO training, offers more immersive hands-on experience of analysing and evaluating your competitive SEO position and strategy than we can manage in SEO Essentials