What To Expect From SEO Courses

A huge industry has grown out of the business desire to rank well in search engines. The techniques used are collectively known as search engine optimization, or SEO, and there is no official set of guidelines other than vague documents like Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

As a result of this void of information, you will find a wide variety of SEO courses available on the web, some free and some available for purchase. So, what can you expect from SEO courses?

Understanding SEO

First of all, any good SEO course will give you a good overview of what SEO is, and what you can realistically achieve using the techniques that the course covers. Many people expect to reach the top for terms like 'health' or 'mortgages' but setting realistic goals will be far more likely to yield results, and also results that provide a strong return on investment.

Simple Steps

Training in the SEO field should always be simple. It is not rocket science, although it can be confusing with all the different opinions on factors that relate to your website's position for a particular search term. You can expect SEO courses to lay out simple plans of action, and each step should be a quick activity which fits into the bigger plan for results. For example, writing an article for submission to an article directory, or creating some useful and in depth content for your website.

Identifying What To Change

Although no course will give you specifics about what to change on your website, you will usually get access to a sample site that you can relate to your own. You should also be taken through the structure of pages and how they are linked together. For example, a page discussing an acne treatment for teenagers will often be intending to target that specific phrase, so good advice might be to link to that page within your site with the phrase 'acne treatment for teenagers' as well as including it in the article itself. These factors which influence your rankings are known as on page criteria, and you have direct control over them as a website owner.

The Missing Link

An often overlooked part of an SEO strategy is links to your site from elsewhere on the Internet. This might include social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, or other related sites containing articles similar to your own. When search engines see these links, they consider them recommendations of the quality of your website, and reward you in search results accordingly. As this is so often missed by websites in their quest for better rankings, SEO courses often focus much of their time in this area. It is a good idea to try to create links from other sites by having content on your site that people want to link to voluntarily, although many courses recommend at least partial involvement with link building directly.

Track Everything

A final piece of advice that good SEO courses should include is that you should track results of each action you take wherever possible. Tools like Google Analytics will help you achieve this, and also show you exactly what people type into the search engines to find you. In turn, this information is critical in the ongoing development of your site, and delivering exactly what your visitors are looking for.

SEO Manchester is part of the UK SEO Network. Please also visit our sister sites SEO Leeds and SEO Newcastle [l]