SEO Basics – Beginner Training

Before the advent of the Internet, customers searching for businesses used billboards, phone books, and print ads. While all of these marketing venues all have different advantages, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that most of your customers will be looking for you online. Search engines are gatekeepers, using algorithms that determine whether or not a site ends up in the results. To drive the most business to a site, a business needs to learn to use search engines to their advantage through precise SEO use.

What is SEO? Think of SEO as the language of search results. In the early days of the Internet, the language was simple. Businesses could just use the same keyword repeatedly with decent results. But over time, as the Internet grew and diversified, the algorithms that drive search results have become much more complex. 

The end goal of this course is to give you a solid understanding of modern SEO terms and strategies, the knowledge and ability to use tools to drive visitors to your site and utilize search engines to your advantage. Upon completing this course, you will understand how search engines optimization works, what drives visitors to one site over another, how to design and structure web content, how to measure success, and what kind of keywords you should be using for peak site performance. 

Areas This Course Will Cover:

How Search Engines Work

Learn the definition of a search engine and their basic mechanics. We will discuss how search engines like Google and Bing index content online and what causes certain sites to rank higher than others. You will learn how to use crawling, indexing, and search functions to your advantage. We will also discuss how to create proper ratios of keywords and content for the best ranking. 

Crawling and Indexing

Think of the Internet as a giant spider web, with the search engine “spiders” crawling over it, constantly searching for new content to rank. Companies like Google are constantly trying to improve their own users’ experiences by finding the highest quality content to highlight. You will learn how to create simple, straightforward content using the appropriate and most effective keywords and related terms. 

Providing Search Results

Learn how page rankings on search engine results affect your target audiences. Ranking on the first page of search results is an incredibly important priority for any online business. After all, who really ever goes past the second page of results? With literally hundreds of pages competing for their attention, you will discover what makes a page rank high and what hides it in obscurity. 

Keywords

Gain an in-depth understanding of keywords. Targeted specific keywords and phrases elevate a site’s ranking immensely in search results, but companies will often overdo certain words or fail to identify the proper keywords they should be using. You will explore why certain keywords and phrases work and how to avoid the ones that don’t. 

Backlinks

While keywords often get most of the SEO glory, backlinks are just as important to improving your ranking. Search engines often prioritize sites with backlinks, and backlinks help to boost the relevancy and popularity of your chosen keywords. You will learn how to use both these tactics in tandem, working smarter, not harder, when it comes to content creation. 

Rankings

The algorithm that Google uses for its search engine is constantly evolving, going through almost 300 tiny changes every year. That can make it difficult to stay ahead of the curve; but you will gain a solid understanding of ranking qualifications that are tried and true, such as design, coding, and original content, integrating what you already learned about keywords and backlinks to bring the whole package together in a dynamic site design. 

SEO That Matters

While it can sometimes seem like getting more visitors is the only thing that matters, more visitors are useless if they are not the right visitors. Learn how to optimize for your target market, with search-engine friendly HTML text and content. We will also discuss how to tag media content, like videos and graphics, to enhance exposure and get a site’s ranking high in the search results that matter the most. 

Writing for Humans, Not Robots

The most basic priority of any business should be to create a website that customers genuinely want to use. After all, a flurry of clicks doesn’t always result in sales. In this section, you will learn how to write content that solves a problem or answers a question first and how to optimize that content for search engines second. 

Keyword Tools

You’re not alone in figuring out which keywords will work best. Here we’ll share some of our favorite keyword research tools and how to use them effectively. 

Measuring and Tracking

Learn how and what you should be tracking to properly quantify successes and address failures and how to keep an SEO log and what metrics you should be following. You will also discover how to track and measure site traffic to identify what drives visitors and where they come from.

Common SEO Mistakes

No one is an SEO master when they start. We’ll cover some of the most common SEO mistakes sites make and how to fix them, including repetitive target words, irrelevant content, and a lack of proper site structure. 

Learn the Language That Gets You Seen

By the end of this course, you will have a confident, competent understanding of basic SEO strategies and tools, enabling you to improve your search engine rankings, generate traffic, and increase customer conversion. You will come away with a checklist and action plan that will help you to continue to practice and learn after you have completed this course. 

The Internet is not a mysterious force but an understandable machine, and SEO is the language that drives that machine. Learn how to master and use that language to compete in the global online market.

Enrol now to start boosting your online presence and climb up those search engine rankings!