SEO Training

If you want to save yourself thousands of pounds by doing your own SEO, we offer training courses to help you achieve this.

Courses can be for individuals or groups. We will also do seminars and offer basic training courses at conferences.

For the more adventurous, we provide some advanced courses and can help teams of marketers to work far more efficiently and achieve some astonishing SEO results on very large database sites and portals.

Here are some notes taken by a student who attended a basic SEO course in spring 2011.

Sigma Web Ltd – Training notes from 29.03.11

Basic SEO

Slide - SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

There are no magic number of links
You are not fighting against Google; you are competing against your competitors
Key words = the search terms people use in Google/search engines
Sign up to Google Analytics – Google is free – by using Google Analytics you will get information about traffic to your site
Google page rank – the word ‘page’ is the name of the person who devised the method of attributing ‘value’ to a page, Larry Page.
Google ranks and gives pages marks out of 10.

Slide – White Man Magic/Black Art

The world of optimisation is unregulated and anyone can set themselves up as a Search Engine Optimiser even if they’ve only attended a half-day course or read an article.
The industry has a poor reputation
SEO can be complex/difficult/expensive and secretive but it shouldn't be
Sigma Web Ltd are open and honest about their techniques as should any decent SEO company

Slide – So where do I start?

Don’t cheat – also known as ‘black hat’ methods E.g. hidden text off-page, text in graphics
Don’t present a page to a user that isn’t the same as a page you would give to the search engine

Slide – Checklist Part A

Technical/Server settings
An http://domain should redirect to http://www.domain – there should not be 2 instances of a site
All sites should have a Robots.txt file
All sites should have 2 sitemaps – an xml sitemap and a user / html sitemap
Google Webmaster Tools is free – set it up; it gives lots of advice and help and is easy to follow – lots of ‘how to’ videos etc

Slide - On page factors – Part A

Page titles – each one should be different and be descriptive as well as containing the key phrase for the page
Meta data – the Meta description is important but NOT the Meta keywords. Descriptions must be accurate, on topic and different on each page
Content – Google can’t see colour or graphics – content needs to add value to the Google database
Duplicate content gets ignored

Slide - SEO Software

You don’t necessarily have to buy any
There are lots of free ones and you should be using Google Webmaster Tools

As you can see, the course covered the basics and it is clear from the notes that the student understood and was happy with the level of SEO training he received.

If you are interested in our SEO training, click here to enquire.