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Beginners Guide: Your Training On The 1st Page in Google

Creating an online training takes a lot of effort and time. Once you’re done, you want to make sure people will find your online training through search engines such as Google. And you don’t want to be just anywhere in the search results, you want to be on the very first page, preferably in the top five results. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

How Does Online Search Work?

SEO increases the rank of your online training site in search results. Just to be clear: this is not advertising, it’s all about getting people to find your online training through, mainly, Google.

So, how does it work? How can you improve the ranking of your online training in the search results? First of all, you need to know a little bit about how search engines actually work – not in any technical detail, but generally speaking.

How Do Search Engines Discover Any Online Training?

Imagine for a moment there were no search engines. What would you do to find an online training? Maybe you would visit a site where they list a lot of online training sessions. Or maybe you’d use the Yellow Pages website to find trainers and then look up their offerings.

Well, this is more or less what search engines do to discover and rank your website too. Actually, they try to visit all sites on the entire internet and one strategy for that is to follow links from one website to the next. Once they have found your website, they create a table with all the words on your site. For each word, they also keep count of how many times you used that word. So, it’s really a frequency list of keywords. Creating a frequency list of keywords is also called indexing.

If you start a search and type in keywords, a search engine will look up your keywords in those frequency lists. The search engine’s assumption is that sites with a very high frequency of the words you’re looking for, are more relevant to you than other sites.

But there is one more trick search engines use to determine the relevancy of a specific site. This is comparable to asking around before you make a purchasing decision on a car. If you hear a lot of people talking about a specific car dealer, you will be more inclined to visit that dealer, versus the other dealer that nobody seems to know about.

What search engines do, is measuring the number of incoming links. In other words: they count how many other websites link to your website to see how important your website is. While doing that, they also take into account what the nature of the linking websites is. For instance, if a website with hundreds of topics links to your online training, that link will count less than a link from another website which is specifically about online training.

Where to find a good one?

An analogy would be you – still shopping for a new car – listening more carefully to your sister who reads ten automobile magazines every week versus your brother-in-law who only brags about his own car. In other words: you assign more authority to more knowledgeable sources.

How Will Search Engines Find My Training Website?

Based on what we’ve learned about search engines, we can now specify two important rules:

1. Write text containing the relevant keywords
2. Make sure you have incoming links from relevant websites

If you follow these rules, search engines will find your training site and rank it high in relation to the set of keywords that best describe the nature of your training website. In other words: if people type in the keywords that are a very close match to your website, they will get to see your website on the first page of results.

As an aside, if you have a brand new training website, you can simply add it to Google using Google’s Webmaster Tools. Other search engines have similar tools to add your training site to their index.

Now, let’s look at each of the rules in some more detail.

Write text containing the relevant keywords

How do I know this actually works? Well, right now my blog post about productization for trainers ranks very high in Google if you use those exact keywords while searching for it. That’s because my blog post is highly specific and custom tailored to trainers.

To illustrate the importance of keywords, consider this. There is even a bunch of entrepreneurs who check if a specific search domain is still available. They will think up a number of highly specialized keyword sets, see if these keywords drive enough traffic (if search engine users click through to their website, based on those keywords) and only then they’ll create the actual product.

Make sure you have incoming links from relevant websites

What can you do about rule number two, making sure you’ve got a lot of other websites linking to yours? You could add your site to “web directories” such as the open directory project or the Yahoo! Directory. Unfortunately, these directories are so general in nature, that search engines do not assign much relevancy to a listing there in relation to the keywords which describe your training website. In other words: it doesn’t hurt to be listed in those directories, but it won’t make much of difference for your search engine ranking.

Another strategy is to link to your own website on all sites which allow user edited content. For instance, you could link to your website by posting a comment to a blog post (such as this one). However, unless your comment also contains something of actual value, such as relevant good advice, your “contribution” will be viewed as link spam. In that case, most blog owners will simply delete your comment or not even publish it in the first place.

So, the best way to go about this is by trying to help out other people. Only link to your own training site if you’re pretty sure your training would help people visiting the site that does the linking.

Should I Expose My Entire Online Training to Google?

Some LMS systems (learning management systems) offer the option to expose your online training to search engines such as Google. The advantage is that Google will be better able to index your site (this improves your site’s ranking).

However, even if your online training is configured to allow only search engines (outside your regular trainees of course), it’s still technically possible to gain access to your training. Malicious hackers might impersonate a search engine, for instance.

So, unless you’re offering a free training, accessible to all, you should not open up your training to any search engines.

Instead, create a very good summary for each training on the homepage of your LMS. This summary should contain all the relevant keywords and also a description of the intended audience. It would be even better to create a separate webpage for each summary, where you state everything there is to know about your training:

• Topic(s)
• Goals
• Intended audience
• Duration
• Type of training (entirely online, blended or in face to face session only)
• Anything else which is relevant to your specific training or situation

Be as specific as possible. If your training is mainly focused on sales managers but also contains some tips for all types of managers, stick to sales managers anyway. In other words: search engines love specialization and reward it every time over general descriptions.

Do I Need A Professional?

If you have read this far, then you do not need a professional. Seriously, all a professional can add to your online training’s SEO, is relieving you from the tedious job of checking your site’s ranking on a regular basis and trying to get your site posted on important and relevant sites. As a matter of fact, you are better qualified to judge whether a site is relevant. An SEO professional might list your online sales training on a site for sports trainers, just because both your sites contain the word ‘trainer’.

Black Hat Hacker

If you do want to hire a professional, make sure they do not employ any of the black hat SEO techniques. Black hat techniques try to trick search engines into ranking your site higher than is actually deserved. In other words: your site will also show up when less relevant keywords are used. This will ultimately result in a disappointment, as any resulting visitors of your site will not exactly find what they were looking for. The blackhat SEO “professional” will still charge you because, hey, they have led visitors to your training site…

Most Important SEO Tip: Content Is King

To conclude this post here is the most important SEO tip: content is king. The content of your training site should state exactly what you are offering. Do not be vague or general in the hope of winning more customers. Instead, go for content which is custom tailored to a very specific type of customer: your actual, existing customers. Try to write your training site’s content from their perspective. Use words they would use to find your site.