A Teaching Moment: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics
With more than 1.5 billion Web sites, 400 million Facebook users, 5.5 million Twitterers, and over 100 million blogs, it can be difficult to stand out in cyberspace. While there are a multitude of tips, tricks, tools and tags that can help attract search engine traffic to a site, the process of search engine optimization is complex and multifaceted.
Last week I had two hours to share SEO basics with a classroom full of communications students. Rather than attempting a full-scale PowerPoint assault, I devised an in-class activity that would show students some of the basics of SEO implementation, but also show them the power of building relationships and earning links.
I spent about 20 minutes at the start of class giving a simple overview of what SEO is and how it works. I went over the Google Formula, keywords, tagging, headlines, and off-page factors that lead to high search rankings, then the class was put to work.
The students, each of whom have developed a blog as part of their class projects, were tasked with writing a blog post about the fantastic new (fictional) cleaning solution Flooneed produced by Bipowk Inc. “Floneed” and “Biopowk” were chosen because Google searches of the words returned only one or two results. Students were instructed to include a disclaimer (provided as a jpeg) stating that Flooneed and Biopowk were nonsense words and that the posts were written for an in-class exercise on Search Engine Optimization.
A week later we did some sample Google, Yahoo and Bing searches to see how the different blogs stacked up. Students who had Twittered about the post, or commented on another blog and linked back, shot to the top on all the sample Flooneed searches. Posts that had a specific focus, such as using Flooneed to get out tough dirt and grass stains on a sports related blog or as a heavy-duty kitchen cleaner for a food and cooking focused blog, ranked highly when we brainstormed reasons why people might search for a cleaning product and used Google AdWords to check out hot search terms.
How do you teach SEO skills? I’d like to find a good resource sheet that I could hand out to students in the future giving them a quick guide to SEO basics. Any suggestions?
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