How to use SEO for your online course?

Let us check out how to use SEO for your online courses and boost your online traffic.

A Brief Introduction of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. As the name suggests, SEO is the process of optimizing the quality of the content on your website to get better traffic through Search Engines. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc rank the web pages and websites based on the quality of the content. This ranking is used to later show the web pages or websites on their search results. 

These search engines have certain algorithms (processes) with which they rank the contents on the internet. Optimizing a particular website or a blog or any kind of content on the internet for getting ranked higher on search results is termed Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

How Does SEO work?

There is a particular term in the world of search engines called, search engine "spiders". These spiders go through... or rather crawl through all the content over the internet. When you publish a website/article/blog or any type of content on the internet, the search engine spiders crawl through the text, image, video, and metadata on that particular blog/article or post and it understands the type of content on your website. It then indexes your website under relevant categories and search items.

When a user searches for an item that matches the category that your website is in, the search engine shows your website in the search results.

How to make sure that your website ranks higher on search results.

There is no one-time solution for this particular question, there are only strategies that you can adapt to win the rankings. First of all, there should be a lot of relevant content on your website.

Search engines look for keywords, which is the exact word that a user types in the search, on your website. So you can make sure that your website/blog/article contains enough keywords related to the content.

You can focus on a particular keyword or more and use it in every section of your blog or article. Also, you can make sure that you use the focused keyword on headings and "ALT Text" of images. The images you add to the page or the post can have a neat title (file name) that is relevant to the content in that image.

Search Engines have a very complex algorithm for ranking the results, it is very advanced that it knows the best way to show the results. So in this man versus machine battle, your only solution is to post genuine good quality content that people are more likely to search about.

Where can I learn SEO?

As I mentioned above, there is no definite procedure that guarantees ranking on search engine results. The best thing you can do is to use certain strategies to help your website higher. However, there are certain tools and methods which might help you to get into the game. If you post content on the internet, you MUST learn SEO. Here are some places to learn SEO.

• Brian Dean is an American Entrepreneur who runs the website Backlinko.com. He specializes in SEO and has a Youtube channel which definitely gives anyone a head start into SEO. You can watch his videos here
• Income School is another website and Youtube channel which posts good quality content on SEO and a lot of other resources which can help you in your internet business.
• Once you learn the basics of SEO, Moz can be a great tool for you to apply and test your understanding of SEO. They have a tool that can help you in Site Audits, Rank Tracking, Backlink Analysis, and Keyword Research. Check out their website for more details.

How to Set up your Course to get ranked on Google.?

1. You can use some or most of your lessons as blogs/articles to increase the number and quality of content to gain Google's trust. If your course lessons contain video or audio content, you can transcribe it and post it on your website. You can use software like Otter or Descript for transcribing your content.
2. You MUST have a website on top of your course where you can give more information about the course and extras to drive traffic from search results to your website and then to your course. Make sure you apply everything you learn from the above-mentioned sources or from anywhere while posting content on your website.
3. You can use all-in-one LMS platforms like New Zenler which allows you to host your courses, set up the payment gateways, marketing funnels, websites, and blogging. New Zenler allows you to optimize the course content and pages for Search Engines.
4. Learning is the most important step in SEO. You will learn more as you go deeper and deeper. Make sure you watch and read about the latest techniques about SEO from the above-mentioned Youtube channels and websites.

How to optimize images for SEO?

Another important tip while setting up your posts is the use of images. You need to use images in your blog or website. As images will give a better understanding of the content to your audience and they are more likely to read or go through the entire article and less likely to bounce. Search engines will keep track of the bounce rate and having people stay on the page or post for a longer time will make a good impression to search engines.

While choosing images, make sure that you use non-copyright or free images. Or you can use your own images, which is much better.

You also need to give a relevant title and file name for the images and it is also important to describe the image in the "Alt text". You can find free images on websites like Pexels or Pixabay

The images you use on your website or blog need to be optimized for the internet. This means that they should be compressed to load quickly and also have a web-friendly file format such as WebP. Also, make sure that you don't lose the quality while compressing the images. You can try out tools like TinyPNG for good quality compression of your images

Once you have mastered all the strategies and once it starts working for you, come up with your own strategies and techniques and reap the benefits of SEO for years to come