Finally completed another Lynda course (see certificate Link no longer working). I’ve mentioned that I’m doing some SEO work at Cogneato, so I decided to go through a course on Lynda. I had started one a while back, but it was very long and on the old side (2006). There’s a newer, shorter one now entitled “SEO: Search Engine Optimization Getting Started “. It was good and detailed without being overly verbose. I like her methods, especially her message to write for users rather than search engines. I think they work better long term and are better for users than some of the more old school methods. I will try to implement some of the methods at Cogneato.
Some important points from the course:
– Optimize your site for users rather than search engines. Search engines want sites that best meet users needs, and of course so do users.
– Make your site link-worthy, so that other sites and search engines will want to link to them. Make it a go to site for certain information, products, etc.
– Your targeted keywords should be relevant to the pages they are on be frequently searched but not have a lot of competition from other sites.
– Title tags and meta descriptions are what are seen on SERPs, so make sure they are something users want to click. Terms they searched for will be bolded in these.
– Title tags and page headlines are given importance by search engines for rankings, so include keywords in them. Internal links and alt tags are also important, so make them descriptive.
– Make sure your site is crawler friendly. Flash-only and javascript-only content is not crawled.
– Promote with social networking and with link connections with partners, customers, and communities you’re involved in.
– Organize site architecture and navigation based on importance.
– Don’t worry so much about rankings in search engines, but rather about conversions.
– Watch analytics software to track conversions, see what is and isn’t working, and improve your SEO based on that.
Hopefully that’ll be more useful than the previous posts about Lynda courses I’ve finished.
I think I’m going to discontinue my use of Lynda for a while. I haven’t been using it much at all over the last several months. It doesn’t delve that deeply into web development, so I’ve had to use other sources to learn most of what I’ve been working on lately. And $25 a month is still a fair amount of money for me.