This was a deck I created in my last semester of college. My plan was to market an SEO course to freshmen and sophomores, using this deck to drive the discussion. I never ended up teaching the course but decided to post this deck to my blog 7 months later.

1. The Fundamentals of SEO
Brendan Cottam
@bjcottam

2. This is how I felt 3
months into
learning SEO.

3. Now that I
built a
foundation,
learning SEO
is fun!

4. Why is search important?
Average searches per day
5,000,000,000
4,500,000,000
4,000,000,000
3,500,000,000
3,000,000,000
2,500,000,000
Average searches per day
2,000,000,000
1,500,000,000
1,000,000,000
500,000,000
0
1998
2000
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/

5. Interactive marketing will reach $77
billion in 2016…

6. …this spend will represent 26% of all
advertising budgets combined
http://blogs.forrester.com/shar_vanboskirk/11-08-24interactive_marketing_spend_will_near_77_billion_by_2016

7. Let’s Distinguish SEO and PPC
Paid Results
Organic Results

8. SEO is…
Increasing a
websites visibility through
search engines

9. Major search engines and sending
traffic worldwide
90.62% of traffic
3.72% of traffic
3.78% of traffic
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-people-interact-with-search-engines

10. 3 Functions of search engines
1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking

11. Saw Hello To…
…They navigate the web by crawling pages

12. BTW, the web is made up of 30 trillion
pages, and it is constantly growing
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/

13. After a page is
crawled, search engines
index webpages and add
them to servers

14. Then…search engines rank pages in
order to return relevant
information to the consumer (you!)

16. In the previous slide, was a result for
“sweet twitter bios.” Included in the
results was an old post I wrote.
In this case:
1. Google bot crawled the page
2. The page was indexed in the Google
servers
3. Google began ranking the page for
the term “sweet twitter bios”

17. 3 types of search queries
a user can type in

18. This is a
transactional
query
Paid Results
Organic Results

19. This is a
navigational
query
A search that
implies a specific
online destination

20. This is an
informational
query

21. Ok sweet, now how
do I do SEO

22. Keyword Research
Get into the mind of your potential
customers, and think about what they are
searching for to find what your business offers.
Use Mergewords to collect all permutations of a
given phrase.
Use Keyword Planner to find search volume for
given phrases.

23. Head Terms vs. Long Tail Terms
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

24. On Page Elements
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-anddevelopment

25. Off page - Link Building
A link from another site is like a vote in the eyes of Google

26. Questions?