SEO & SEM Master I™ with certification from IIDM

What is search engine optimization (SEO)? | Lecture 7 Description

Plain and simple, search engine optimization is the process of making improvements on and off your website in order to gain more exposure in search engine results. And more exposure in search engine results will ultimately lead to more visitors finding you for the right reasons.

In order to understand what improvements will affect search engine results, let's take a step back and understand the goal of the search engines themselves.

Activity 7:

1. Watch video 7; What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Resources Summary

• 10 SEO Tips, Tactics, and Trends for Website Content in 2021 Youtube Video

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? | Lecture 8 Description

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). While the industry term once referred to both organic search activities such as search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising, it now refers almost exclusively to paid search advertising.

To fully answer the question, “what is SEM?” It helps to know how SEM is different from other terms related to search marketing.

Activity 8:

1. Watch Video 8; What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Resources Summary

• Youtube Video on INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Reading search engine result pages | Lecture 9 Description

Before we dive into working on getting your website to show up in the search results, it's important to understand how those search results actually look like.

Although there are a lot of search engines around the world, and they all have some distinct differences, there are some common characteristics that their search engine results pages, or SERPs, may have. One thing that we're probably going to find are some paid listings.

Activity 9:

1. Watch Video 9; Reading search engine result pages

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on The Beginner’s Guide To Technical Seo

Setting SEO expectations | Lecture 10 Description

Search engine optimization is a process that requires a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of patience. Throughout this course we'll dive into more about how to do SEO, but before that it's important to set some expectations.

Activity 10:

1. Watch Video 10; Setting SEO expectations

Resources Summary:

• Youtube Video on Technical SEO Audits: Tips For Successful Implementation

How SEO affects your business | Lecture 11 Description

If you're a businessman, there are some very real and specific benefits to having a consistent, ongoing search engine optimization strategy.

For the first time in the history of marketing, users are offering up their actual intent through the words that they type and speak into search engines. And more than ever before, you can measure the results of your SEO efforts as a marketing channel.

Activity 11:

1. Watch Video 11 How SEO affects your business

2. Complete Assignment 3: Self Assessment 1 Keyword Plan

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT

Why you need a keyword-research plan | Lecture 12 Description

Finding the right keywords to focus your SEO efforts on, can be challenging, but fortunately, there's a lot of data out there, and a structured approach that we can use for our keyword research. Keywords are what searchers type into a search engine, search engines like Google and Bing will go out and fetch the most relevant results for your search query based on everything they know about you and all the content on the entire internet.

But it's important to remember that search engines have a hard time understanding what a user is after, unless it's really spelled out. In this lecture we will look at how to sift through all the available data to utilize the most relevant information.

Activity 12:

1. Watch Video 12 Why you need a keyword research plan

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on 5 Tips To Promote Your Handmade Business Online

How to research keywords | Lecture 13 Description

Everyone will eventually develop their own approach and process for doing keyword research and you'll ultimately need to find something that works for you. But the most important part of keyword research is to forget about you and your business and put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. The process typically begins with brainstorming and answering some key questions.

This lecture will give you as a marketer examples of how to formulate a good keyword research structure.

Activity 13

1. Watch video 13; How to research keywords

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on 4 Ways to Find Low Volume Keywords for SEO

Tools to help you analyze keywords | Lecture 14 Description

Now that we understand the basics around how we conduct keyword research, let's dive into the tools that will help us find more keywords and collect all the data we'll need. There are quite a few good tools out there, but for this video, we'll use the Moz Keyword Explorer tool. Not only does this tool provide a good measure on search volume, it also suggests related keywords as well as provides an idea of what types of sites and content are currently holding the top positions.

Activity 14:

1. Watch Video 14; Tools to help you analyze keywords

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on 7 Free Keyword Research Tools

• Youtube video on The 7 Best Keyword Research Tools

Understanding keyword distribution | Lecture 16 Description

Keyword distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on your website. This is an important step in the content creation process and results in the content on the page being aligned and relevant to the keyword you're targeting on that page. Remember, you can't have an optimized page unless you know what keyword you're optimizing it for. Let's look at how you can align your content and keywords for better distribution.

Activity 16:

1. Watch Video 16 Understanding Keyword distribution

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on Blog Posts That Get 1000 Visits or More Target 38 Keywords

Majestic performs important functions for your website’s SEO. It offers the most accurate steps for your website to be successful with its analysis.

Majestic SEO does detailed studies for both personal and corporate websites. The most important work in these studies is link control. Despite the detailed and difficult works it performs, it has an easy structure and interface. Besides, Majestic SEO, which does not lag short of developing software technology, constantly publishes new updates. Thus, you can always get full performance from this tool.

Majestic SEO does a thorough backlink check. A backlink checker is an important SEO tool for any SEO work. Majestic SEO creates the link profile of your website. This way, you may create the right link-building strategies.

The backlink profile prepared by this tool is the most comprehensive profile for your website. Let’s take a look at how this tool creates this backlink profile.

Majestic SEO performs a backlink check for both your and competitor websites. Then, it compares the data obtained from this process with the wide backlink index it has. Thanks to the large number of backlinks it has, it brings out the most accurate result for your website. Let’s take a look at what features Majestic SEO has.

Ongoing keyword evaluation | Lecture 17 Description

Ongoing keyword evaluation is critical to the long-term success of your SEO efforts, and it's really the last step of the keyword research cycle. With all of the great keyword data that we can look at, the one data point that we can't find out about in advance is how they'll actually perform for us. Once we start ranking for the keywords that we've targeted and we start to get traffic coming to our pages as a result of those rankings, we'll need to see if those keywords are actually driving conversion actions and helping us achieve business objectives.

Now let's consider how we can do this.

Activity 17:

1. Watch video 17: Ongoing Keyword evaluation

2. Complete Assignment 4: Self Assessment 2: Get to know the tools

3. Complete Quiz 1: Self Assessment 1 - The FOUNDATION OF SEO & SEM

4. Complete Assignment 5: Request 1:1 Coaching and Training from our IIDM™ Certified Immersion Trainer

Resources summary:

• Youtube video on 10 SEO Tips, Tactics, and Trends for Website Content in 2021

Understanding content optimization | Lecture 18 Description

Content optimization is the process of improving the quality and relevancy of your site's content. We'll discuss a number of things about how both users and search engines interpret what makes good content. But first let's go through a few examples of how you and I as human beings might read a piece of content and figure out what it's about.

Activity 18:

1. Watch Video 18; Understanding Content Optimization

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on 5 Tools To Help Your Content Marketing Team Be Better

Optimizing site structure | Lecture 19 Description

As you focus on more and more keywords and themes, you'll be developing more content on your website and you'll start to have a lot of pages to hold this content. It's going to be important to structure all of these pages in a meaningful way, because in order for search engines to return your pages to searchers in response to relevant search queries, they need to understand how your pages relate to one another.

Activity 19:

1. Watch Video 19; Optimizing site structure

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on Best WordPress Maintenance and Management Services

Optimizing textual page elements | Lecture 20 Description

The main goal of a search engine is to guide people to content that is relevant to the keyword or phrase that they search for.

We can fine tune the relevance of a page for a certain topic through the process of on page optimization. In this lecture we look at how to do this for textual page elements.

Activity 20:

1. Watch video 20; Optimizing textual page elements

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on Best Managed WordPress Hosting

Optimizing nontext components of a webpage | Lecture 21 Description

Search engines are generally very good at analyzing and understanding the text content on web pages, but search engines have a more difficult time with other forms of content like images, videos, and audio clips. Let's take a look at a few different ways we can go about optimizing these types of content for our target keywords.

Activity 21

1. Watch video 21; Optimizing nontext components of a webpage

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on Get More Google Traffic

Interpreting the code behind web pages | Lecture 23 Description

The end goal of a search engine, when it's crawling a page, is to try to determine what a web page looks like to regular people. But the search engine can't see a page like we do. Instead, it sees the code that web servers send back to our browsers, and to help illustrate this, let's take a look at the Explore California home page.

Activity 23

1. Watch video 23; Interpreting the code behind web pages

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on 10 Powerful WordPress Marketing Tips

Understanding how search engines index content | Lecture 24 Description

It's important to understand how search engines discover new content on the web and how they interpret the locations of these pages. One way that search engines identify new content is by following links. Much like you and I will click through links to go from one page to the next page.

Activity 24:

1. Watch Video 24 Understanding how search engines index content

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on 6 Tested Ingredients To Create Landing Pages That Convert Customers

Working with canonical URLs and redirects | Lecture 25 Description

As search engines try to find an index of all the pages they find on the internet, they rely on unique URLs as pointers to each piece of content. Well, there should be a single unique URL for every page on the internet.

Activity 25:

1. Watch video 25; Working with canonical URLs and redirects

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on How To Use A Web Cache Viewer: Everything You Need To Know

Leveraging microformats | Lecture 26 Description

Search engines do a good job of identifying what the overall content of a web page is about. But you may have parts of a web page that contain very specific types of content, like product reviews, embedded video, or even a food recipe.

Activity 26:

1. Watch Video 26; Leveraging microformats

Resources:

• Youtube video on SEO AND SEM TIPS

Working with server-side factors | Lecture 27 Description

Well, content and links can affect your website search engine visibility, your web server can also play a big role in how search engines view your website. The key here is to make sure that you're serving up pages fast, and you're serving them up reliably. Remember, a search engine is trying to give its users the best experience possible and sending them to a page on a server that's down half the time, one that takes an eternity to load is not going to be a quality experience.

Activity 27:

1. Watch video 27; Working with server-side factors

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on Best Domain Registrar

• Youtube video on The Best VPN Services

Using Google Search Console | Lecture 28 Description

Let's take a look at how do you use the very basics of Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools to learn what information Google has about your website, how it views your website's overall performance in search and how we can use it to provide Google with instructions around how to best crawl and index your pages.

Activity 28

1. Watch Video 28; Using Google Search Console

2. Complete Assignment 6: Self Assessment 3: Get to know Google Tools

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on 7 Free Keyword Research Tools

Overview of long-term content strategies | Lecture 29 Description

With many businesses turning to online as a medium to market their products and services, it's more important than ever that business owners understand why having a

content strategy will help propel them forward and achieve success with their search objectives. A content strategy is the planning, creation, and management of usable content. Let's take a look at each of these components individually.

Activity 29:

1. Watch video 29; Overview of long-term content strategies

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on 6 Low-cost Content Marketing Strategy For Early Stage Startups

Plan a successful content strategy and avoid common mistakes | Lecture 30 Description

Every organization is different. We all operate in different environments, and we all have different goals. So, everyone's ideal content strategy will be unique. But, in order for us to understand what content strategies work and which don't, we can look at some of the core components of content strategies that successful organizations share.

Activity 30:

1. Watch video 30; Plan a successful content strategy and avoid common mistakes

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on How to create a content marketing strategy for your personal brand

Understanding different types of content | Lecture 31 Description

You might think that content is just text on a page, but these days, that's not the case. Content can take many forms, including slideshow presentations, images, infographics, video, audio, augmented and virtual reality, and much, much more. Let's take a look at some of the different content types out there on the web.

Activity 31:

1. Watch video 31; Understanding different types of content

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on How to Create High Converting Content

Getting ideas for content | Lecture 32 Description

Getting ideas for writing content can be tough and many people struggle at this stage of the game. While only you can figure out what content will accomplish your search engine optimization goals, there are a few things you can do to get the creative juices flowing.

Activity 32:

1. Watch video 32; Getting ideas for content

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on 5 Content Marketing Tips That Will Give You An Aha Moment

Working with an editorial calendar | Lecture 33 Description

An editorial calendar is perhaps one of the most important parts of your content strategy and without proper planning, you'll find it difficult to establish consistency or structure in the content that you're posting to your site. An editorial calendar simply maps out your content development process, assigning writers and dates to the topics of pages, posts, or any other content that will be going up on your site.

Here's an example of an editorial calendar. And while you can certainly use this format to get started, keep in mind that there's no single editorial calendar that will fit every business, so you'll want to update this to a format and structure that you are comfortable working with and that fits the unique needs of your content strategy.

Activity 33:

1. Watch Video 33; Working with an editorial calendar

Resources Summary:

Youtube Video on 8 Habits You should have for Quality Content Marketing

Promote your content with social media | Lecture 34 Description

Social media can be a great way to let the world know your content is out there, and can even be a source of referral traffic in it's own right, helping potential customers find you.

But social media is an always evolving landscape and some businesses jump into a new platform much too quickly, without really knowing how to use it effectively. Others are too slow to adopt. And when they do, they face going up against more established social competitors. It's good to be an early adopter, but it's critical to have a strategy in place before you get involved in any social platform.

Activity 34:

1. Watch video 34; Promote your content with social media

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on 15 of the Best Social Media Tools

Measuring content performance | Lecture 35 Description

Measuring the performance of your content is essential to determining the success of your SEO efforts and to guide your content strategy. By looking at how your content performs, you'll be able to understand what your visitors want and provide more of it to them in the future.

When you evaluate your content's performance, it's important to ask these questions: What pieces of content are our visitors looking at? What's our most popular content? Are our visitors engaged with our content? Are they sharing our content with others? And is our content generating quality business results?

Activity 35:

1. Watch video 35; Measuring content performance

2. Complete Assignment 7: Self Assessment4: Content Strategy

3. Complete Quiz 2: Content Optimization & Long - Term Content Planning

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on How To Set Content Marketing Goals That Matter To Business Leaders

AI-Powered Content Creation Tools for Social Media Managers

Here’s the thing. Whether you’re a one-person shop or you have a full marketing team, keeping up with your brand’s content creation needs is always a challenge. From social content to emails to blog posts to sales pages, digital marketing just requires So. Many. Words.

AI-powered content creation tools can't replace great writers — but the truth is, they help writers and marketers save time and use their skills for more strategic aspects of content creation. AI-powered content writing is a way to improve the writing process and make it more efficient, not replace human writers outright.

When artificial intelligence takes care of mundane writing tasks, writers (and non-writer marketers) can use their skills for more valuable aspects of content creation, like content mix and conversion strategies.

Jasper: AI Tool to create Social media posts

Now let’s look at a practical example of an AI tool for social media, more specifically for copywriting.

The AI copywriting tools that are now available are fantastic for writing product descriptions, ad copy, social media posts, and even doing SEO copywriting for blog posts.

There are many AI copywriting tools out there now. Not all of them are great, and they all have their pros and cons.

But first, what is AI Copywriting?

AI Copywriting refers to a myriad of different products that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to augment or generate text.

Most recently, GPT-3 by OpenAI has unleashed a flurry of new copywriting software.

GPT-3, quickly, is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It uses natural language processing to learn context and generate copy from that understanding.

In layman's terms, this means it writes text using pre-trained algorithms that have been fed text data by crawling the internet (using a publicly available dataset called CommonCrawl) and all of Wikipedia.

Jasper

Jasper is really the only AI copywriter that can actually generate long-form blog content.

Their AI-based writing assistant is trained by conversion and copywriting experts, which helped it acquire incredible writing skills and write copies that convert.

They even claim that every line of their website copy was written by their own copywriting tool. For some reason, they do search-engine-optimized content quite well.

Introduction to ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI that uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to natural language input. It is one of the most advanced chatbots available today, with the ability to converse on a wide range of topics and provide accurate answers to complex questions. ChatGPT has been trained on a massive corpus of text data, allowing it to understand and respond to natural language queries with high accuracy. It is used in a variety of applications, from customer service chatbots to virtual assistants and more.

Understanding the importance of links | Lecture 36 Description

One of the most important aspects of SEO is links. This has traditionally been the backbone of how search engines work. As search engines scour the internet and crawl all the pages in the world, they find links pointing to other pages.

You know that clickable text that you see everywhere that takes you to some other page? You can think of each one of those links as a vote, and not every vote is the same. Remember that some sites are considered more authoritative and trustworthy than others.

Activity 36:

1. Watch video 36; Understanding the importance of links

Resources Summary

Youtube Video on What Is a High-Quality Link? Backlinks Strategies

Building internal links | Lecture 37 Description

Earning links back to you from people and websites that you don't control is a necessary but challenging thing to do. But don't forget about the links you do have complete control over.

Determining how you link to pages on your own site is important for search engines as well. Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website, the topics and themes of your content, and even the relative importance of each page on your site. We can break down internal linking into two different types, navigation links and contextual links.

Activity 37:

1. Watch video 37; building internal links

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on Know the Basics of Link Building to Boost Your SEO

Building external links | Lecture 38 Description

Building quality links to your website will improve its overall popularity in the eyes of the search engines, and improve your search engine visibility. But you're probably thinking what most people are thinking at this point, how do I get links pointing back to my site when I don't have control over other websites out there? The good news is that links come in different forms and can be generated from different tactics.

Activity 38:

1. Watch video 38; Building external links

2. Complete Assignment 9: Self Assessment 5: Link building strategy

Resources Summary:

Youtube video on 5 Types of Bad Backlinks You Don’t Want

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a "vote of confidence" from one site to another.

In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP. So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site's ranking position or search visibility.

Finding link-building opportunities | Lecture 39 Description

Search engines rely on links to determine whether your web pages are trustworthy and authoritative. And to uphold that status, it's important to always be on the lookout for new link-building opportunities that you can take advantage of.

Activity 39:

1. Watch video 39; Finding link-building opportunities

2. Complete Quiz 3: Link-building strategies

3. Complete Assignment 10: Request 1:1 Coaching and Training from our IIDM™ Certified Immersion Trainer

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on Must-Have Landing Page Tools landing page

Measuring SEO performance | Lecture 40 Description

One of the biggest challenges that you might find is in figuring out whether your SEO campaigns are succeeding or not. SEO measurement not only involves the analysis of basic metrics like traffic resulting from organic search engines, but it also requires a holistic approach to measuring business outcomes and making adjustments based on data. If you've never paid attention to measuring SEO before, there are some basic things you'll need to have checked off your list.

Activity 40:

1. Watch Video 40; Measuring SEO performance

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on How To Use Google Analytics To Boost E-Commerce Sales

Analyzing keywords | Lecture 41 Description

Keywords are the backbone of search engine optimization. And when we're measuring our SEO efforts, analyzing the different keywords that are bringing people to our

websites is an excellent place to start. Again, there are many enterprise-level analytics tools that you can use on your website that can help you accomplish your task. But for this lecture, we're going to use Google Analytics.

Activity 41:

1. Watch Video 41; Analyzing keywords

2. Complete Assignment 11: Self Assessment 6: Google Analytics

Resources Summary

• Youtube video on How To Use Google Analytics To Boost E-Commerce Sales

Analyzing links | Lecture 42 Description

Over time, if you're consistently putting out good quality content, promoting it and working through link outreach opportunities, other websites will start linking to you. And being able to clearly see what's happening to your link portfolio can tell you how you're doing in your quest to show the search engines just how trustworthy and authoritative your pages are.

There are a few really good tools out there for analyzing backlink metrics like Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Raven, SEMrush and others. But in this video, we're going to once again use Moz's Link Explorer. It's also important to know that you can use these tools to analyze links for any website, not just your own.

Activity 42:

1. Watch video 42; Analyzing links

2. Complete Assignment 12: Self Assessment 7: Moz Link Explorer

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on What Is a High-Quality Link?

Understanding SEO and ecommerce | Lecture 43 Description

These days, lots of people use search engines for shopping, whether they're in the early stages of research or they're ready to buy something right now. Whatever stage of the buying process they're in, if you sell the products that they're searching for, you're going to want to be found. And there are a few different things to consider that are specific to

E-commerce websites that can help a search engine match your pages to the intent of people's search queries.

Activity 43:

1. Watch video 34; Understanding SEO and ecommerce

Resources summary:

• Youtube video on HOW DIGITAL MARKETING CAN ACCELERATE E-COMMERCE (SEO/SEM/EM)

Understanding local SEO | Lecture 44 Description

If you're a brick and mortar business or if you have a local presence, then it's important to know that your potential customers are using search engines to look for local products and services and search engines are getting pretty good at giving users exactly what they want with some very specific local types of search results.

Activity 44:

1. Watch video 44; Understanding local SEO

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on SEO or Paid Ads

Understanding mobile SEO| Lecture 45 Description

Everywhere you look these days, it's evident that mobile devices have become a part of our day to day lives. In our workplace, at home, and everywhere in between, we're continuously connected through our phones, tablets, watches, virtual assistants, fitness gear, security systems, and even our thermostats and smart home devices.

As searches from mobile devices continue to grow, it's crucial that we take the mobile experience into account when we're talking about search engine optimization. But before we worry about how we're going to get found by search engines, it's important that we talk about how user behavior on mobile devices is unique.

Activity 45:

1. Watch video 45; Understanding mobile SEO

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on DRUMMING UP ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Facebook Advertisement: SEM For Your Business | Lecture 46 Description

Paid Facebook ads are important to companies because they allow you to attract a targeted audience. Facebook advertisements are tailored to users based on location, demographic, and profile information. Many of these solutions can only be found on Facebook. After making an ad, you set a budget and bid for each click or thousands of impressions that your ad would get.

Facebook ads can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. With simple measurements and unparalleled ability to target based on interests and custom audiences, Facebook ads can be the difference-maker.

Activity 46:

1. Watch video 46; Facebook Advertisement: SEM For Your Business

2. Complete Assignment 13: Self Assessment 8: Create a Facebook Advertisement

3. Complete Quiz 4: Measuring SEO Effectiveness & Ecommerce

4. Complete Quiz 5: Certification: SEO & SEM I

5. Complete Assignment 14: Request 1:1 Coaching and Training from our IIDM™ Certified Immersion Trainer

Resources Summary:

• Youtube video on Facebook Advertisements

• Link to Facebook Blueprint

Congratulations on completing your SEO & SEM Master I™ training with the International Institute of Digital Marketing™!

We are proud of you, of your accomplishment, and of the contributions and effort you have provided. To acknowledge your personal milestone, we are excited to share your well-deserved certificates with you. Please accept your globally recognized Digital Marketing certificates as our sincere appreciation for your dedication to our organization.

We are glad that you were part of our journey. Thank you for all your time and effort.

On behalf of the IIDM™ Team, we wish you all the best.