Why should you sign up to an SEO Training Course?
If you are running a website and you want to attract visitors
to it, then you need to promote it. That might seem obvious
but it is alarming just how widespread is the myth that
once a site arrives on the web, then, as if by magic, visitors
flock to it without any effort on behalf of the web owner.
No one would set up a new shop in a side street, with no
sign outside and no advertising anywhere and expect customers
to flock to it. But this is exactly what many new website
owners expect from their new sites.
There are many different strategies that you can use to
attract visitors to a site, pay per click, banner advertising,
links, offline promotion but perhaps the most important
in the long term is SEO, search engine optimisation. This
is the way in which 'free' traffic is attracted to the site,
via the natural or organic listings in the search engines.
Although free might be a bit of a misnomer (as getting those
rankings takes effort and effort has a price) SEO does offer
the most economic long term solution to driving traffic
to a site.
Getting a page one ranking in a major search engine such
as Google is a competitive business. 'seo training courses'
for example, is not a very competitive keyword but even
so, there are 21,800 sites competing for it in a UK search
on Google. Make that an international search and the number
rises to 201,000. If you are competing for a really competitive
keyword phrase such as 'online marketing', then the numbers
rise to 6.4 million and 137 million competing sites for
UK and international searches respectively.
My point is that luck won't get you to the top of Google,
it takes knowledge of how the search engines work if you
want to out rank your competition. So how do you get that
knowledge?
There are two routes to getting a top ranking. Either you
use the services of an SEO professional or you learn the
methods and techniques yourself and take the search engine
optimisation and marketing function in house. So let's look
at both options.
Using an SEO Professional
If you find a good one, and it is a big 'IF', then outsourcing
to an SEO professional can be the right solution. However,
there are some disadvantages to be aware of. Firstly it
is expensive if done properly. SEO takes knowledge and it
takes time, both of which cost money, and this is money
that is an ongoing expense. Your site is competing against
other sites that are continually trying to out rank your
site, and the number of sites is always increasing. This
means that SEO is not a 'one off' project but an ongoing
one.
The second disadvantage of outsourcing is that it is becoming
increasingly difficult to optimise a site in isolation to
the whole online marketing effort. Gone are the days when
optimising the metatags and adjusting the keyword density
would have a significant effect on their own. Now the search
engines are much more sophisticated and it is a combination
of a multiplicity of strategies that are required in order
to achieve success.
The third disadvantage is that this is a new industry with
no regulation as yet and a huge amount of ignorance abounds.
This is the perfect environment for cowboys to operate in,
and they do. The result can be a waste of money but it can
be a lot more serious. There are 'white hat' and 'black
hat' ways of promoting a site and if an unscrupulous SEO
uses unethical techniques on your behalf, although you might
achieve high rankings in the short term, you can end up
getting banned by the search engine indexes, which will
take a lot more time and effort to put right.
So learning about SEO yourself makes sense, even if you
then decide to outsource. As the saying goes "knowledge
is power"!
SEO Training Courses
Learning what gets a site to the top of the engines makes
sense. We all know that marketing and sales are vital to
any business success so learning how that works for your
website is really a no brainer. So what should you look
for when choosing an SEO
course?
Does it cover everything you need to know?
There are something like 95 different parameters that a
search engine algorithm will use to rank a page, so there
is a lot that needs to be included, such as
Do you get a good training manual at the end of the
course?
You don't want to spend all your time taking notes, so
will you take away a good manual that will serve you well
after the course? We suggest this is imperative.
What sort of support is offered afterwards?
Inevitably, questions will come to mind when you are putting
new ideas into practice. Will the course presenters be available
to provide support when the course has finished?
Financial considerations
Training may look expensive but paying a professional SEO
every month will very quickly far outstrip the cost of a
one or two day training course. It is the old story of give
a man a fish and you feed him for a day, offer him a fishing
rod and the knowledge to use it and he has food for life.
And one final point.… There are huge opportunities for
cowboys in the web world, particularly the SEO part of it.
If you do decide to outsource, gaining knowledge of what
is involved in getting good rankings will not only help
you to choose the right the SEO professional for your business,
it will also give you a good idea of the sort of fee you
should be paying for their services. You will soon see that
the too good to be true offers to online success are just
that: too good to be true, and they could land you in very
deep water! An SEO training course could easily be the best
investment in you ever make in your website and business.
Search Engine Workshops Ltd
Rosedale House
Rosedale Road
Richmond
TW9 2SZ
