SEO Course April 2012 – Week 1 Summary
Posted by EssexMax on 17 April 2012 under Course Notes | 
Be the First to Comment
Monday the 16th of April 2012 saw the start of another “Search Engine Optimisation Course” at South Essex College, as part of the Weekend and Evening College courses.
The course had a good healthy number of attendees: Gill, Lee, Kevin, Paul, Luke, Brian, Michelle, Shirley and Mark.
As with all of the web courses that I look after, there’s a varying degree of skill mixes – some who are very experienced with web development, mixed with those yet to get online with their first website. I appreciate that it may be daunting for some of you, especially when I answer questions about subjects that you’ve not yet been exposed to, but it will become clearer as we go on. Honest!
Hopefully in Week One of the course, we have established a shared language, and are familiar with the concepts that people search in very different ways, and it’s not always easy to predict how users will find your site. It’s also important to remember that because of personalisation, not everyone sees the same results when doing the same Google search.
We also discussed how search engines spider your site, and some of the things that won’t help your site to rank well. These include:
- Not having ALT tags on your images
- Use of Javascript for text content
- Use of Frames
- Over use of keywords, a.k.a keyword stuffing
- Duplicate content
- Over-use of Flash, or content that contains little or no plain text
Next week, we will be diving into web stats, and how these can be used to understand how your visitors interact with your site.
The SEO course was last run in January 2012, and you might be interested to read the post that I put together after the first week of that course back in January: SEO January 2012 Week One Notes.
Homework for next week:
Ideally, it would be great if you could sign up to a free Google Analytics account, and get the tracking code on your site.
I appreciate that it may not be possible for all of you to do this, so note a problem if you can’t. If you need any help getting Google Analytics set up, add a comment below, and I’ll try to help.
If you can’t, have a look to see what other web stats you can access between now and next week. Most web site providers offer some kind of stats service, possibly something that shows number of visitors, perhaps like this:
Ideally, see what you can get, and we’ll discuss what it all means next week. If you want to read ahead, see my article: Web Stats: Understanding Your Audience
It would also be good to know that you’re reading these notes, so if you’re on the course, please add a quick comment or question in the box below – it’ll be good to know you’re reading, and it’s a way of asking any questions ahead of next Monday’s session.
Add A Comment