Boost your SEO with online learning

At Candle Digital we are passionate about online learning and keen to demonstrate that there is so much more to it than most people realise. The term e-learning usually conjures up images of soul-destroying, self-paced courses where you read some text, click next and repeat until you lose the will to live.

That’s an image we’re keen to ditch, so as an example of one of the benefits of online learning, I want to show you how it can be used to boost your rankings in search engines.

e-Learning for SEO? Surely not!

A couple of years ago, I attended a fantastic training session with London based SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consultant Danny Richman (www.seotraininglondon.org). The session was a massive eye opener into the way search engines work and gave us tools to monitor both our own and competitor rankings and strategies to improve our position in the natural search listings. Everyone in my group loved the session and we came away inspired, with heads full of ideas. I would personally recommend his training sessions to anyone who is serious about their online presence.

SEO is obviously a massive deal for businesses and if you run a business you will probably have already considered ways you can improve your rankings. Companies spend thousands each month making sure their rankings are monitored and optimised.

Backlinks

If you do a little research into SEO you will find that a significant factor search engines use to determine where you appear in their natural listings is the number of other websites that link to you. Links from other websites to pages on your website are commonly known as ‘backlinks’ and search engines use them as a measure of how important your website is.

“Links on the Internet form a relationship between pages and sites that are hugely important to both search engines and marketers. Search engines, like Google, use links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher’s query.”
– Moz

So how do you get other websites to link back to you?

The process of gathering backlinks is often called ‘Link Building’. The Moz link above is an entire blog category dedicated to it.

Danny gave us a range of great ways to generate backlinks, but it boils down to creating great content that is naturally shareable. Among other methods he suggests:

• Videos
• How-to guides
• Expert advice
• Dummies guides
• Interactive calculators
• Online tools
• Webinars
• Infographics

Furthermore, a blog by Leeds based digital agency Smart Insights identifies Case Studies, Best Practices and How To Guides as the most effective types of content in B2B marketing.

The common theme

Notice a common theme with these types of content? You’ve guessed it, they are ALL forms of online learning. So, embrace the benefits of online learning and use it to create free content that teaches, inspires and informs. If it’s of interest to people it will get shared, generate backlinks and ultimately aid your online marketing efforts.

It goes without saying that the more interesting your content is, the more likely it will be to gather attention and get shared. If you’d like an example of how you can make your content interactive and engaging, checkout out our Perfect Cup Of Tea demo here.

As always, if you’re looking for a helping hand with online learning we’d love to chat through your ideas. Just leave us a message in the box below and we’ll be in touch!

Mark Langdale