The ClickMinded SEO Training Course
Frequently Asked Questions
So, what’s the deal?
ClickMinded was originally a live, face-to-face training class I held on weekends, for startups in San Francisco. I was getting good feedback on it and decided to turn it into an online course. Originally designed as a one-day SEO training bootcamp, the online class aims to empower students to confidently and intelligently take control of their organic search strategy as quickly as possible.
What difficulty level are we talking about here?
This course has been developed for people with little to no experience in search engine optimization. That being said, even those well-versed will find a significant amount of the information useful. The course and video tutorials are split up in a way so that the introductory content can be easily skipped if needed. A number of my colleagues in the SEO industry have taken away a lot from the course.
How long is the course?
The course is a little more than 5 hours. It has been cut up into small, digestible and organized segments, so you can refer back to it when questions about specific topics come up long after you’ve taken the class.
Will I be “SEO Certified” or will I get some kind of accreditation?
No. There’s no such thing as an SEO accreditation or certification. Be careful of companies that offer certificates because they’re generally not recognized by anyone. The only certification I would recommend getting is one from Google. They offer both a Google Adwords Individual Qualification, as well as a Google Analytics Individual Qualification. If you’re interested, I wrote a quick guide on how to pass the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test.
What secret tactics am I going to learn that no one else knows?
None. You can learn everything in this class through other people’s blog posts, forums, and trial-and-error. There is nothing secret here. That said, there is a lot of information (and misinformation) out there. This class is designed to make search engine optimization as digestible as possible, but it won’t be teaching you anything you can’t learn on your own.
I’m looking for actionable information that I can use immediately. Does this class have it?
Sure does. After having some of my friends and colleagues take this class, the most frequent comment I heard was “This is great… but how do I get started?”. That’s why I added a comprehensive video tutorial of how I start a new website in the most SEO-friendly way possible. It’s an hour and twenty minutes of pure video screen capture, and contains the exact strategy I use to developing a website, from concept to completion:
- Thinking up an idea and doing the corresponding keyword research
- Mapping prospective keywords to URLs
- Deciding on and purchasing a domain name
- Getting the site live and hosted on Dreamhost
- Installing WordPress and a WordPress theme
- Configuring wordpress for SEO best practices
- Installing multiple plugins
- Installing Google / Bing Webmaster Tools and analytics
- And a deep analysis of competitor links, in order to get a head start on rankings
Sorry… who are you?
Tommy Griffith has been doing search engine optimization for the last 4 years, was the co-founder of an online medical tourism agency based in Taiwan, and worked at a boutique digital marketing agency in Singapore. He was previously SEO Manager for Emerging Markets at PayPal, and is currently on the SEO team at Airbnb. He feels weird writing about himself in the 3rd person, but admits that it sounds slightly more epic.
If you’re here, you’re probably interested in understanding how to get more visitors to your website and more visibility in search engines, but you’re not sure where to begin. After all, it can seem like a daunting and complex subject, and if you personally don’t think you’re capable of learning how to get your site ranking higher in search engines, it’s hard to justify investing more time in trying to learn.
So let me propose something simpler to start.
The hardest part of learning SEO is investing the time to learn what search engines are fundamentally looking for.
And not just the tactics, but learning all of it. The evolution of search engines, the stuff that used to work and the stuff that has never worked. The white-hat, the black-hat and the gray-hat. All of it. The perspective that Google and Bing take, as well as the perspective your competitors take. On and off-page optimization, technical optimization and more. Maybe you’ve been trying, but can’t seem to get results — or you’re not sure if what you’re currently doing is working. Maybe you’re like one of the many people who send me emails all the time:
- “Why aren’t the links I’ve been building helping me rank higher?”
- “How is my competitor outranking me?”
- “I’ve been blogging for months but nothing seems to be working. What should I do?”
If so, I think this might be something you’d like.
I recently created a new training class – the ClickMinded Online SEO Training Course. It’s a step-by-step guide to getting your site ranking higher in search engines, in order to get more traffic and acquire more customers. This course is specifically focused on helping you fundamentally understand how search engine optimization works — and shows you how to immediately start implementing techniques that will help your site rise in search engine results.
What does this mean for you? No more getting stuck on too many SEO tactics and strategies that you’re unsure about. No more sifting through mediocre advice and trying to parse through what’s true and what’s false (instead, I’ll show you how to implement an effective, fundamentally sound strategy that will bring you higher rankings and more traffic).
The ClickMinded SEO Training Course
Chapter Index
On-Page Optimization Off-Page Optimization
- Site Foundation
- Age of Domain
- Duplicate Content
- 301 Redirects
- Canonical Tags
- Indexing
- WWW vs. Non-WWW
- XML Sitemaps
- Site Speed
Extras
- Evaluating Competitor Links
- International SEO
- International SEO 2
- SEO for WordPress
- Social Media and SEO
- Reputation Management
- SEO Tool Review
Recently Added Modules
The full online training course includes:
- Introduction to SEO Primer – What search engine optimization is, how it came about and why it’s so important. This module is designed for those with little to no Internet marketing experience.
- A Comprehensive Guide to On-Page Optimization - Which includes a thorough understanding keyword research and searcher intent (with live step-by-step video tutorials), as well as meta data optimization.
- A Comprehensive Guide to Off-Page Optimization - A total summary of off-page optimization, including why Google has such a strong emphasis on links, the criteria for good links, synthetic link profiles vs. natural ones, recovering from bad links and more.
- A Detailed Technical Optimization Analysis - Which covers some of the most pressing SEO considerations, including 301 redirects, canonical tags, site speed, HTML and XML sitemaps and indexing.
- The Competitive Analysis Tool Overview - Gives you actionable data on which tools to use in order to acquire your competitors’ link profiles, along with the keywords they’re targeting.
- Social Media and SEO Synopsis - Social Media and SEO intersect in a very collaborative way. This training includes a lecture on how social media networks like Twitter and Facebook affect search engine rankings.
- The SEO Tool Review Guide - which includes a huge, unbiased selection of the best free and paid tools in the industry that I personally use. Keyword research tools, link analyzers, technical audit tools and more.
- SEO for WordPress - a lecture included in the class that shows you why WordPress is such a great platform, and how to get the most out of it from an SEO-friendly perspective.
- The Startup SEO Audit - which is a 20 minute section where a startup in San Francisco allowed us to do a full, comprehensive analysis of everything they’re doing wrong (and right) on their website from an SEO perspective.
- The Start a New Site Video Tutorial - A 12 lecture, 60+ minute screen capture walk-through. This is the exact strategy I use to start a brand new website in the most SEO-friendly way possible. It includes keyword research and mapping, picking a domain name, hosting, plugins, configuring and installing WordPress, Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, analytics, URL structure, competitive link analysis and more.
- The ClickMinded SEO Training Handbook - Includes all of the material in the 5-hour course, available for download in PDF form. I recommend printing these out prior to watching the videos in order to get the most out of the class.
- The New Site SEO Checklist - An overview of the entire class, in a simple one-page document, so you’ll be sure to cover everything mentioned in the class when starting a new site.
