Course Syllabus - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Introduction and Syllabus Review

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
- Spam, penalties and Google’s “supplemental index” 

Before You Begin:

- Site statistics
- Preferred domain and the problem of duplicate content

- Google Webmasters Tools

- The robots.txt file
- The importance of HTML validation 

Keyword Searches and Selection:

- Word tracker, 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?
- 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

- “Write for the visitors, not for the search engines.” Is this still true?
- .htaccess, redirects, and Google sitemaps