About This Course
Search Engine Optimisation is a way of thinking about, and creating content for, your site. In this series you'll learn how to create a site that is both indexed by search engines and found by real people.
Course Lessons
Lesson 1
Run Time 02:16
Clean & Descriptive URLs
First we take a quick tour of our imaginary coffee shop website. It's a basic 5/6 page site with a homepage, a blog, contact information, photo gallery, and newsletter signup. Then we'll talk about what you should think about when choosing URLs for each page. Finally we'll use RapidWeaver's built-in features to set a descriptive URL for each page, and publish those changes to our server.
Lesson 2
Run Time 22:21
Browser Titles
The page title should be an accurate and concise description of a page's content, this is important for the user experience and SEO. A well written page title gives an expectation of what to expect on the page.
Lesson 3
Run Time 11:09
Meta Tags
Learn how to set global and page specific meta tags in RapidWeaver. We'll also discuss which meta tags are important, and how to tweak the content for best SEO results.
Lesson 4
Run Time 07:31
Sitemaps and Robots
A sitemap is an XML file with a list of links to all of your pages. This XML file is used by search engines to more easily index all of your pages. If your site’s pages are properly linked, search engines will be able to discover all of your content. A robots.txt file is a way for you to control how search engines index the pages of your site.
Lesson 5
Run Time 18:58
SEO Friendly HTML Part 1
Whilst the HTML structure of you page is not completely under your control — it never is when using a template based site builder such as RapidWeaver — it is definitely worth taking some time to consider how you structure the content you place on the page. In this lesson we'll be looking at how you can structure you content in a logical, SEO friendly way.
Lesson 6
Run Time 22:51
SEO Friendly HTML Part 2
Whilst the HTML structure of you page is not completely under your control — it never is when using a template based site builder such as RapidWeaver — it is definitely worth taking some time to consider how you structure the content you place on the page. In this lesson we'll be looking at how you can structure you content in a logical, SEO friendly way.
Lesson 7
Run Time 11:07
Keyword Research Part 1
Keyword research is all about knowing the actual search terms that people enter into search engines. Researching keywords will help you to achieve better rankings in search engines for the terms people are interested in.
Lesson 8
Run Time 19:05
Keyword Research Part 2
Keyword research is all about knowing the actual search terms that people enter into search engines. Researching keywords will help you to achieve better rankings in search engines for the terms people are interested in.
Lesson 9
Run Time 16:38
Content Is King
As I've said many times, content is king! Spend most of you time focussing on good quality content. A nice looking website is useless without something interesting or useful to read. Ensuring the "meta" side of things is taken care of (such as URLs, page titles, meta tags, and HTML structure) is essential, but without the content to back it up, you won't see any results. Why? Because good content promotes the likelihood of "Quality Links" — links from other websites that are an authority in your area.
Lesson 10
Run Time 13:10
Why You Need A Blog
If content is king, then a blog is the almighty emperor. Having a blog will allow you to easily post interesting articles that can be linked to from other sites and social media. The end goal with SEO is to increase traffic to your site, so having quality articles on your blog is the best way to get more links to your site.
Lesson 11
Run Time 14:01
Link Building
If you are just getting started with SEO you might not know about backlinks. A backlink is when another website links back to your site from their site.
Lesson 12
Run Time 24:20
Tidy Up
In this lesson we’ll tie up a few loose ends before we move on to some more advances subjects such as HTTPS and caching.
Lesson 13
Run Time 08:53
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is a great way to ensure your site is being indexed correctly, that there are no major errors harming your site, and find out which search terms are leading visitors to your site.
Lesson 14
Run Time 30:18
HTTPS, Caching, And Optimisation
There's a lot of focus on how fast your site loads, especially since the emergence of smart phones. Search engines want to provide the best experience to their customers, and sending them to a page that takes an age to load is not a good experience.
Lesson 15
Run Time 18:10
Social Integration
When visitors share your site on social media you’ll want it to it to stand out from the crowd. This is where OpenGraph and Twitter Cards come in. You can add some special meta tags to provide additional data to social media sites, that will allow them to display your site in a rich way.
Lesson 16
Run Time 11:45
Site Analysis & Wrap Up
We’ve covered a lot in this series, so in this final lesson we’ll analyse our site’s SEO performance and see if there’s anything we can still improve upon.
Teacher
Ben Counsell is a full-stack web developer who has been working on RapidWeaver for all of his professional career. His unique insight in to web development, design, and RapidWeaver will inspire you to build amazing websites.