Sign up to our online university and master the art of search marketing. With interactive modules and over 133 hours of advanced HD video content, you can learn at your own pace and in your own time.
"Basically, you are bringing the entire process into one place, step by step, in plain English. Simplicity is a genius thing! ... Congrats guys, awesome job." Peter Van den Broek, Discount Vacation Rentals
This course covers the core skills that every SEO needs to know as part of their skill set. Beginners should start with Search Engine Basics and work down the list of modules. Intermediate and Advanced users can tackle modules in any order.
To become an effective SEO, you not only need to understand the principles of on-page and off-page factors, but you must also understand users and how the Internet works. This module gives an outline of the World Wide Web; an overview of crawling, indexing and ranking; and a history of search engines and more recent developments.
In addition to entering simple keyword-based queries, the major search engines all offer advanced query operators that give you more granular control over the results returned. This module explores a variety of these advanced query types and combine them in useful ways.
On-page optimization is the practice of ensuring the content of a page is set up to be relevant for the search queries being targeted. If the phrases you are hoping to rank for don’t appear on the page, it will be much more difficult to achieve your goals - making on-page optimization a crucial part of most SEO campaigns.
The web is a technical platform, and there are correct and incorrect ways of building websites. This module teaches you about these and how search engines interact with pages in order to help you diagnose problems and improve websites.
Robots.txt is a widely-acknowledged standard and allows webmasters to control all kinds of automated consumption of their site - not only by search engines. This module teaches you how to read and write a robots.txt file.
Keyword research allows you to bridge the gap between what your potential customers are searching for and the content you create for your website. This module teaches you how to choose the right keywords to help drive your desired audience to your site.
An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for. This module teaches the best practices and their associated underlying theory, common pitfalls as well as tools and methodologies for improving sites' architectures.
Competitor research uses data and insights from the other companies in your market to find opportunities and build a marketing strategy. This module teaches you how to conduct the research and build the resulting strategy.
Being able to break down what makes a link valuable is essential to creating an effective link building plan. This module teaches the components that make a valuable link, helping you to optimize your best links and avoid wasting time with risky, low value link building strategies.
Setting up Google Analytics on a website can be daunting for beginners and Google's Help documentation can be confusing. So, through interactive learning, this module teaches you how to set up and customize the Google Analytics code snippet that you place on your website.
Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) allows you to see reports and alerts relating to your site’s Google search presence, and to give Google information that can help it to understand your site. This mini-module helps guide you through the ever-changing task of setting the tool up correctly.
This course covers advanced topics including outreach, linkbait, content strategy, video and SEO tools, taking your SEO skillset to the next level.
Building links can be a big part of your job as an SEO because it plays such a big part in the algorithms used by search engines to determine the order of their results. Therefore it is worth investing time in learning how to build links properly and by properly, we mean build the links that will stand the test of time.
In order to market online effectively, it’s important to have an understanding of how the web works. While we don’t imagine that every search marketer should be a network engineer or be interested in digging deep into network protocols, we believe it is important to understand some of the magic that happens between hitting enter in your browser bar and a web page appearing.
Outreach is part link building, part public relations, and part business development wrapped up into one with an end goal of improving rankings, brand visibility and ultimately conversions.
The goal of this module is to give you a solid grounding in the building blocks of Excel models, covering the most useful core functions as well as basic best practices.
To understand what activities improve the visibility and effectiveness of our websites, it’s important to gather and analyze data about how our users reach, interact with, navigate and convert on our website.
Many tools exist to help SEOs at their jobs. We often get asked how to wade through the plethora of tools to find the ones that do the job best. We’ve put together a collection of tools that our consultants use, as well as advice about how select your own set of tools.
You don't need to be a web developer to be an effective web marketer but you'll find that having a basic understanding of HTML is a skill you'll use daily. This module focuses on learning to read and understand the core elements of HTML.
Search engines have users all around the world and to serve these users the most relevant results, they must distinguish between multi-lingual websites and multi-regional websites and deal with the challenges that lie around this. This module explains the challenges of international SEO and how to overcome them.
Meta information is background information about a page rather than information displayed to a user on a page. This module walks through interactive examples for things like declaring the canonical version of a page, controlling a page's indexation and controlling what text and images are shown when a page is shared on Facebook and Twitter.
Google uses over 200 factors when determining where a web page should rank for a certain keyword. The main signals are often talked about. This module explores a number of other ranking factors that are a bit more subtle and may not have been discussed as much.
This module shares the lessons we have learned building a consulting business which will help you get things done whether you're a consultant or in-house. The main topics covered are personal productivity, team productivity, and managing clients and effecting change
To help you determine the best approach to handling mobile traffic on your site, we’ve put together an outline of some considerations you’ll need to bear in mind, along with our best practice guidelines and other tips and tricks for every stage of the process.
This module covers penalities and algorithm updates - their implications and how to identify whether a drop in site traffic could be the result of one of them. It also teaches you how to efficiently clean up a site’s backlinks to minimize the chance of a manual action or to overcome existing manual action, as well as how to submit reconsideration requests with the greatest chance of success.
App search is a generic term we’re using to describe all the different ways people can find your app. There are three main ways that users find apps: searching in an app store, searching the web, and searching a device. The latter two require indexation of content within the app, and all of them require us to learn new ideas and techniques.
Paid DistilledU accounts now include access to all our conference videos including our most recent. Each one is 45 minutes to an hour of full HD streaming video. They contain top tips, tricks and tactics from leading online marketers from around the world. Check out this trailer to see what kind of thing to expect.