The Academy's Instructor-led Essential Foundations of Search Engine Marketing 8-lesson workshop offers a hands-on approach to Web promotion training with an experienced instructor standing by to assist at every step of the way. By the time our students complete the Web promotion training course, they have a clear understanding of how to get a top search engine position, and they're ready to get to work on the engines and directories not covered in the basic class.

Participants in our Web promotion training who complete all course and certification requirements are eligible to earn Continuing Education Units (CEUs) from the University of Southern Mississippi and certification in Web site marketing strategies.

The Essential Foundations online workshop contains eight comprehensive lessons written in an easy-to-understand manner that non-technical people will appreciate.

The Essential Foundations course does not teach HTML. A basic knowledge of HTML and the Web is needed in order to benefit from the course. For more information, please see our FAQs.

Lesson 1:

What exactly is "search engine ranking and positioning," and why is it so important? How do the search engines and directories operate? Lesson 1 is a good beginning lesson that gives an overview of Web promotion and the search engines to get you started on the right track.

Lesson 2:

Are you using frames on your site? What about javascript or tables? Are you doing anything that could raise a red flag with the engines and destroy your ranking? What is meant by "spam?" In Lesson 2, we look at areas that could potentially create ranking problems, and we learn how to avoid them.

Lesson 3:

It all begins with a simple keyword, so we will spend Lesson 3 determining what keywords are important for the various pages of your site. We'll learn the significance of choosing keywords that will bring you traffic but will still give you a running chance at achieving a top search engine position.

Lesson 4:

Where do you put those all-important keywords? How do the search engines determine relevancy and how can you improve it? What can you do to increase your Web site's popularity, since it's such a major issue with so many of the engines. In Lesson 4 of our Web site marketing course, we'll learn the best places to put your keywords and how to boost your relevancy with the engines.

Lesson 5:

When your customers search for your site in one of the engines, they're presented with a title and description. If your title and description aren't captivating and designed to pull in your customers, you lose, even if you have a top ranked page. Lesson 5 is devoted to creating effective titles and descriptions for your Web pages.

Lesson 6:

Since each page of your Web site can only be optimized for one or two keyword phrases, what about all of the other keywords that are important to your business? And, since each engine utilizes different ranking criteria, one page won't rank high with all of the major engines. Content-rich doorway pages are the answer to this problem and are the focus of Lesson 6.

Lesson 7:

Lesson 7 is devoted to several Web promotion tactics: creative linking, site maps, subdomains, and doorway domains. You'll learn how to utilize site maps to help your doorway pages get found by the engines' spiders, and you'll learn the benefits of purchasing additional domains for your Web site and how to utilize those domains. Lesson 7 also addresses some of the important directories that are crucial to the Web marketing business, such as the ODP, LookSmart and Direct Hit.

Lesson 8:

One of the best ways to study Web positioning strategies is to analyze what your competition is doing and determine why they're at the top of the search engine rankings. What tips can you learn that you can utilize at your own site? Our final lesson pulls in what you've learned so far and points out additional winning Web marketing strategies to achieve top search engine positions.

Addendum

Latest Tips for AltaVista

Latest Tips for HotBot/Inktomi

(Since the Essential Foundations course utilizes AltaVista and HotBot/Inktomi as the testing ground for learning Web promotion techniques, pages containing the latest tips and strategies for those two engines are provided in the Addendum section.)

An Engine-by-Engine Recap of how each of the major engines operate, outlined in an easy-to-read fashion

An Engine-at-a-Glance Chart

Glossary of Important Terms

Checklists for Search Engines and Directories

A Step-by-Step Guide to Using WebPosition Gold Software

Doorway Page Templates to help you create content-rich doorways into your site

Additional Benefits

Students of the Academy can download free trial versions of Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) and Keyword Density Analyzer (KDA) to test drive while taking the class.

Academy students can attend chat sessions offered at numerous times every week. Click here for this month's schedule. Transcripts for past chat sessions can be found here.

We frequently offer chat sessions just for professional search engine optimizers, like the contracts session.

Certification Project

In order to earn certification and continuing education units (CEUs), Academy students are required to participate in a certification project. Students are provided with a "dummy" web page that they will optimize and turn in to their instructor. Their instructor will offer tips for boosting the page's relevancy and ranking, though the page itself won't be submitted to the engines. This project will simply prove that the student has learned the skills needed to optimize a page.

For more information about the Academy and our policies, visit our Frequently Asked Questions page. To ask specific questions about our web marketing courses, contact us.