PRIME discussion forums » General business discussion

1. aamcle
   Member

   Do you happen to know of any courses (preferably taught) in search engine optimisation or search engine marketing?

   I prefer the North West area.

   Regards aamcle

   Posted 7 months ago #

2. abfabmedia
   Member

   Hi aamcle - Funnily enough this is my first visit here and I see this as my first post.

   I have been an SEO, Internet Marketing, WordPress Blog Designer and Google adWords manager etc since 1997

   I got into it quite by chance when I ran a posh wedding DJ business in San Francisco.

   One thing to watch out for with so called "seo courses" is they teach well formulated but DATED practices.

   SEO and related methods changes daily so that is one thing to be wary of.

   When I lived in the US I was offered a nice $ position travelling around the country teaching seo for a large company (no names) and I paid to get into one of their SEO Training sessions to see what it entailed - Basically it was spiders catching flies (pardon the pun)

   All they taught was three - four years old and no juicy new stuff so me not having the nerve to stand in front of a lot of small business people - basically - bs'ing led me to turn the offer down

   My message learn yourself and watch out for the "honey traps"

   Best wishes

   David (aged 58!)

   Posted 7 months ago #

3. DAVID URMSTON
   Member

   Hi,
   abfabme's advice is very good on the usefulness of courses. However, what he didn't say is that you can learn all about SEO by visiting Google's web site and signing up for a Google Account. This will give you direct access to Google's Web Master Tools and very importantly, easy to read documentation which describes what you want to know. And it doesn't come much fresher, plus it is free.
   I run several web sites, my own and some client sites so I know how useful this stuff is.
   regards
   David Urmston
   www.crackpots.org.uk
   www.oxfordpcsolutions.co.uk

   Posted 7 months ago #

4. admin
   Key Master

   I second David and Abfabmedia's advice. Be careful about paying for search engine optimisation advice as much of it is not very good. Google will tell you the basics for free - and their advice is up-to-date. It may eventually be worth going on courses or taking professional advice, but get your web site well-established first.

   There two things you can do in the early stages that will take you a long way towards improving your search-engine rankings.

   The first is to make sure you put a lot of good, relevant content on your site for the search engines to index. Some people concentrate on doing this first before worrying about anything else. www.makeitandmendit.com concentrated on putting a hundred pages up (howerever, there are four of them involved in this venture, so they could share the load and also invited friends to contribute).

   The other thing everyone correctly recommends is to get some links in to your site from other web sites.

   For example. if you look at David's post he has put in two links below his signature - so he is getting links in to two of his sites just by posting in this forum.

   Abfamedia meanwhile has got one link to his site, just by entering his web site address into the profile form when he posted his message.

   For most people it's probably best to concentrate on getting at least 40 or 50 such in-links before worrying about more sophisticated ways of boosting their search engine rankings.

   Ian.

   Posted 6 months ago #

5. chicken
   Member

   Hi ammcle,
   Just came upon your posting and read with interest the points made by David,David and Ian.It is interesting that all of us of a certain age want to immediately find a course to learn something new,(no criticism intended, its just how we are!) and yet all of that information is out there for us to learn from- it is just a question of finding it.

   If you join networking groups such as Linkedin and then find some of their sub groups to join you can glean a lot of information from them.There are also some great marketing people who dispense with their advice for free in the hope that you may pay them at some time for a specific service.Use them there is no obligation !

   A couple I have found to be useful are Mike Seddon who is at www.kksmarts.com and Jarom Adair at www.InternetMarketingForBusinessOwners.com. Once on their emailing list you will get a lot of news letters, which I have found useful.If you don't you can always unsubscribe.

   A book I use, when trying to do something specific is 'Search Engine Optimization for Dummies' by Peter Kent

   I am constantly striving to improve my SEO and have been doing so since setting up my business last year:like painting the Forth Bridge really, there will always be something to do!

   Hope this is of some use and good luck with your ventures

   Caroline

   www.investinmeuk.com

   Posted 6 months ago #

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