Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals - Course Syllabus

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Introduction and Syllabus Review

What to Expect from this Course

Understanding Organic SEO:

- “Ethical” SEO and “black hat” techniques. What they are and which should you choose?
- Organic versus Pay Per Click (PPC)
- On-page and off-page elements
- The importance of In Bound Links (IBL)

How a Search Engine Works:

- The robots, the index(s), the interface
- The Google algorithm: Page Rank (PR) and Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)
- Search engines rank pages, not sites. How to optimize your home page
- Can I be #1 on Google? Yes, you can (but it may not help!)
- Spam, penalties and Google’s “supplemental index”

Before You Begin:

- Site statistics
- Preferred domain and the problem of duplicate content: Google Webmasters Tools and .htaccess file
- The robots.txt file
- The importance of HTML validation

Keyword Searches and Selection:

- Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Overture, Google.
- Keyword choice: the concepts of popularity and competitiveness of a keyword
- Google operators
- Competition analysis: why other websites score better than yours
- Picking your battles: single keyword or key phrase?
- Now I have the keywords, what do I do with them?: HTML tags, page copy and anchor text

Refining Site Architecture and Navigation:

- Domain name(s) and URLs
- Themes

Where To Go From Here:

- Forums: consume responsibly
- Three common mistakes: keyword stuffing, using multiple keywords in meta tags, optimizing home page only
- “Write for the visitors, not for the search engines.” Is this still true?
- .htaccess, redirects, and Google sitemaps