At Enquiro I had clients spanning the spectrum to little B2B tech-startups to huge B2C corporations with a sizable in-house teams. The one thing they all had in common is a desire for more knowledge. Even if your contact is a well schooled SEO practitioner, they’ll appreciate help schooling their team, and in particular their superiors. And we all know how desperately the C-level needs to understand the basics of search. You can also think of this list as a short course in SEO fundamentals for SMB owners.
The one thing that ensures there will be a continuing need for SEO experts and agencies is the need for education. Here’s five lessons to get things off the ground for a group of beginners.
The Search Engine Time Machine
Think of it as less history and more of a trip down memory lane. Who doesn’t remember using AltaVista or Lycos fondly? Try going further back into the history of the information superhighway to dial-up, BBS groups, Compuserve and Prodigy. There’s time for a quick exploration of the evolution of search engines from text to outgoing links to the full Google-PageRank examination of the link economy (but stop shy of nofollow and the glazed looks that will inspire). The old first chapter of SEMPO’s Insider’s Guide to Search Marketing was a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me, and maybe this exercise will help you connect with your audience.
A Guided Tour of SERPs
For 99% of the world Google just works. People just don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Google did the Chrome video where they asked ‘what is a browser’ and about a month later a friend’s boss asked me for help, saying “first I tried it in Google and then I tried it in FireFox.”
Let’s sort out the basics. Explain what a search engine is, how it relates to their browser, and show them the top five engines. No, you don’t need to drag out Bruce Clay’s diagram of the search engine relationships; just show them the different engines. If you’ve got a particularly good class, you can also touch on the different flavors of search (video/image/blog/news)
Now that your pupils can tell where they are on the map, take them on a small walk around one or two engines. There’s lots of interesting landmarks in the blended/universal search neighborhood:
- Paid/Organic Results
- Maps and Local results
- Blended results
- News Results
- Google Base
- Video
- Images
Yup, pretty simple, but there’s a good chance people can’t tell which links are advertisements and I guarantee at least one person will thank you for teaching them something new.
External Links (Assessing, building and when they’re crap)
This might seem obvious, but for most students, it’ll be their first time using advanced search operators. Pick a vertical with some obvious winners and losers. Try to stay away from social-media influenced sites at first, as one piece of successful link-bait will warp their appreciation of the benefits of links. Make sure to do side-by-side check with Google vs Yahoo Site Explorer. This is also a great time to mention the ‘site:’ search as well.
Then take some time to discuss anchor text, positioning and relevance. Hopefully by now your students will be driving the conversation with questions and examples from their own experience or business. Share good link examples and low-quality link examples. Now you’re also starting to arm them with a list of tools to use, and here are some of mine:
- Advanced Link Operators
- Yahoo Site Explorer
- Webmaster Tools: Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- Linkscape
- Hubfinder
Internal Links!
One mistake that SEO consultants make is a focus on external links at the expense on internal links. Now this is not a chance to show how much you know about the details of the PageRank Algorithm. It’s an chance to walk them through their own site and examine the Gourdian knot which likely exists. Two great tools to use here at Google Webmaster Tools data (in excel) and a XENU report (which you should run in advance).
Major points to look at:
- # of Links on the homepage, average content page and an average product page
- Top Navigation (number, crawlability and anchor text)
- Footer and sidebar navigation
- Existance (if any) of links within content
- Best Practices for adding links
One of my favorite internal link headsmacking tips is to go through the GWT data and find internal pages with decent numbers of external links. Usually it’s a great blog post or a product that’s attracted a lot of attention. Then go through it and adjust/add some internal links. Don’t be stupid about it, but a couple links added to the content or a set of 40 useless sidebar links removed can have a significant impact.
Clean, Crunchy Code – An Introduction to Roadblocks
This is easier if the client has a website with problems, but try to walk them through a couple examples besides their own site first. The goal here is to emphasize the need for simple, clean code and help them get used to the things which are instant red-flags for experienced SEO folks.
- Flash
- Splash Pages
- iFrames
- JavaScript
- Checking Google’s Cached Version (and text-only version)
I’m sure there’s more we could cover, but I think this is a pretty solid list of topics to start with.
What would you add? What’s the next lesson?
Photo Credit: pftqg / CC BY 2.0
