 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I need to go on a SEO course, in London. Does anyone have experience of such a thing ?
I am looking for recommendations. One to one tuition might be more suited to me and my wandering mind.
any help much appreciated.
Search engine optimisation can be done two ways. Firstly by making your content good, relevant, well structured and searchable. Or secondly by doing dodgy magic that tries to game the algorithms that search engines use. If you do it the first way by making your content good quality, you have a good chance of getting a high rank for a long time. If you do it the second way, you may gain in the short term, but long term, you are likely to be dumped down out of the search engine index when they spot your trickery. So if you want to learn about SEO, then you need to work out if whoever is teaching you is trying to teach magic to game search engine rankings, or how to actually do your site properly.
Personally I wouldn't bother though, it isn't exactly black magic - this document from google gives you the information you need, from the horse's mouth:
Joe
For example if you look at this site from page 12 in google search for seo training (which suggests they're not that good at SEO!), they suggest things like "We'll also give you ideas to develop your link building strategies." and "How to look for the right type of inbound links to your website, and how to get them", which sounds a bit like link farming, which if you're not careful could be the sort of thing that google dumps sites for. I would steer clear of anyone suggesting things like that. It could be that they give perfectly good advice on the course, but really the only sensible way to do SEO is not to try and second guess how search engines work, but to make content relevant and understandable to the search engines.
( http://www.clearseo.co.uk/seo/seo-training-courses/ )
thanks joe. i will print and read that document.
i want to go on a course so i can initially understand the sheets of stats we receive from our digital agency.. and then possibly manage it in house.
at the very least it is important i have a very good understanding of how the process currently works.
anyone got any recomendations ?
As above, especially the google doc. If there were simply a magic button you could push to be a the top of search then everyone would push it. Rather there are lots of buttons and the more you can press the better you will do. It takes time but it does work. Just doing one or two things isn't good enough
Sorry I can't recommend a course though :(. I just read that doc and do as much as ai can on it and it seems to work
Edit: and these videos, especially the Matt Cutts ones http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp/videos?view=0
i want to go on a course so i can initially understand the sheets of stats we receive from our digital agency
In that case is it actually an SEO course you want and not an Analytics course?
In that case is it actually an SEO course you want and not an Analytics course?
Erm. Both I guess. A beginners course in SEO and Analytics.
Google do an online course in analytics that seems quite good
http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/
Given that google analytics is free and is easy to set up on a site it is worth doing just to see what is going on and what is measurable. There are other ways of doing it of course but if you are just getting going it isn't a bad way to go
i want to go on a course
probably booked well past summer now, but book yourself in with jedi.