24-evening SEO/PPC/Social Media Course training

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of making your web site more likely to show up higher in Google for certain search phrases. Understanding what people are searching for is critical to this goal. We show you how to find these important keywords by analyzing your competitors and using online tools to refine the process. Once you know what to target, you still have to code your web site in such a way that it is easy for Google's algorithm to interpret as relevant to those keywords. Finally, for Google to consider yours an important web site, you have to convince other people in your industry to create links on their web sites back to your site. This is very difficult since there's no motivation for them -- but we show you several clever strategies for achieving this. In the SEO part of the course we show you how to:

• Analyze your competitor's keyword targets by viewing their source code
• Use online tools to find keywords your competitors have overlooked
• Structure your web site so that your keyword strategy is reflected in its link topology
• Prioritize between search phrases that are frequent but vague versus rare but specific
• Code your HTML tags and content to maximize its SEO impact
• Find web sites willing to link back to yours for free
• Create "link bait" so that other sites will link to yours
• Lay out the optimal "landing page" that will be most effective in encouraging users to buy

Pay-per-Click Advertising

Even if your web site ranks well on Google searches, you should also pay for ads so that more than one link to your site appears on the first page of Google's results. The placement of ads is auctioned to the highest bidder with the best ad. There are a bewildering number of different configurations for advertisements but we walk you through them one at a time in logical sequence. We train you on how to:

• Calculate your return on investment (ROI) from advertising dollars
• Open an AdWords account
• Identify relevant keywords
• Set up advertising campaigns and AdWord groups
• Determine how much to pay for ads
• Create an group of rotating ads from which to select the best-performing one
• Compose enticing ad copy with a call to action
• Interpret the various metrics associated with ads: CPM, CTR, Conversion rates, and more
• Decide whether to use text, image, audio, video, or map-based ads

Reports and Analytics

Google offers a vast array of reports to track your ads, as well as a set of charts and graphs to analyze the overall traffic to your web site. Using these tools you can refine and optimize both your ads and your web site in order to increase your conversion rate, turning your visitors into buyers. In this part of the course we show you how to:

• Use the campaign optimizer tool
• Use the web site optimizer tool to refine your landing pages
• Identify the sources of your traffic
• Find entry and exit points to your web site
• Set up a sales funnel with goals to track the progress of visitors
• Indentify and fix pages where visitors abandon their purchase process

Other Online Marketing Venues

There are several other important venues besides Google you can use to market your products online. In this last part of the course we cover how to:

• Set up an affiliate program to let other people market your products
• Create targeted ads on Facebook and LinkedIn
• Draw traffic by posting on blogs and forums
• Draw traffic by creating videos for YouTube

Prerequisites:

• Basic understanding of HTML