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We are thrilled to be sponsoring Marketing Pilgrim’s Search Engine Marketing Scholarship once again this year. The competition involves submitting an article on any subject related to search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) or social media optimization (SMO) before May 23.
The 2008 scholarship is MP’s third in the series and offers the biggest prize pool to date - a USD 10,000 prize package that includes training, subscriptions, consulting, books, an Amazon gift certificate and broad online exposure for the winning article.
As long time sponsors, Search Engine College will be donating enrollment in our Certified Search Engine Marketer Pathway for the lucky winner. I’ve also been asked to judge again this year, so I’m really looking forward to reading all the entries.
On June 30, the five entries that have achieved the highest overall traffic will be selected. To ensure quality traffic influences the outcome, if an entry achieves an average “Bounce Rate” below 75% it will be awarded a bonus equal to 10% of its total “unique views”. If an entry achieves an average “Time on Page” greater than 2:00 minutes, it will be awarded a bonus equal to 10% of its total “unique views”. On July 7, Marketing Pilgrim will announce the grand prize winner, which will be the entry that receives the most votes from the panel of judges.
Good luck everyone and make sure you get your entries in early.
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So you’ve created your search marketing resume. It’s impressive, but you don’t seem to be landing interviews with it. What to do? Never fear, the team at recruitment site Onward Search have shared the secrets to a great SEM resume. They receive lots every day so they know what makes one resume stand out from the rest.
In his blog post 5 Keys to Improving Your Search Marketing Resume, Reilly O’Donnell of Onward Search lists 5 steps you can take to improve your resume and increase your chances of landing that interview:
- Organize - organize your resume into logical sections.
- Bullet Points - use bullet points to break up the document and make it easier to scan.
- Quantify - list specific, measurable results that you’ve achieved.
- Tweak - research the firm and align your resume language with the company’s own terminology.
- Be Professional - check your resume for typos, grammatical and spelling errors and formatting consistency.
Great advice!
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We’ve been busy bees at Search Engine College this week. First up, we’ve created new Certification Seals for graduating students to place on their web sites as proof they have completed a Certification course with us.
The new seals replace our existing ribbon-style seals and contain the student id number embedded within them to aid verification of a student’s Certification status by potential employers or clients. You can see an example on our Certification page.
Inspired by the Google AdWords Professional program (GAP) and the verification page provided for every GAP, we have also created a dedicated Certification Status page for every graduate of Search Engine College. The status page lists a student’s id number, the course/s they have successfully completed and any resulting Certification. It also displays a copy of their Certification Seal for verification purposes. Example here.
Any graduate wishing to replace their old Certification Seal with the new version and obtain their Status Page URL should contact me.
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Hi Kalena,
Help! I’ve had my Hightower pottery website for about 4 years. On a good day I may get 20 hits and that’s during the holidays. Normally I get between 0-10 hits a day. I have listed my site in probably a dozen directories over the years and submitted to the same number of search engines. What am I doing wrong? Is it a content issue?
Charles
Yes Charles, it is a content issue. More precisely, it’s a Yahoo SiteBuilder issue. Why the heck are you using a rubbish Yahoo Content Management System (CMS) to build your site?
Just like Homestead SiteBuilder, which I ranted about earlier this week, Yahoo SiteBuilder is yet another CMS that creates multiple headaches when trying to optimize your pages so they are found in search engines.
I’m not hugely familiar with the SiteBuilder interface, but here are just some of the problems I see:
- The Title and META tags are identical on every page. I’m guessing this is a limitation of Yahoo SiteBuilder that you can’t change. This is limiting the ability of each of your site pages being found in search engines.
- You’ve got a serious case of code bloat, thanks to excessive, code added to your HTML pages by the SiteBuilder program.
- All of your image files and probably others are stored somewhere on the Yahoo site and referenced by your pages, instead of being stored on your own domain.
- This isn’t anything to do with the CMS, but your home page doesn’t really have enough text on the page to satisfy search engines and your pages don’t appear to be optimized for target search keywords and phrases.
- Another non-CMS issue, there don’t seem to be many internal or external links pointing to your site. You should probably try to gain some links from other web sites in your industry as theme-based links will help boost your position in Google. For example, I’m betting that within a month, you will be getting more traffic from this page than any other source. Such is the power of a well-placed link.
If you are serious about your business, you need to get serious about your site’s compatibility with search engines. You’d be better off paying a site designer to build you a REAL site that can be properly optimized. If you can’t afford a professional site design, consider installing the (free) WordPress blogging platform on your server and taking full control over your site that way. If you can’t afford a search engine optimizer, consider posting your requirements on our Search Engine College jobs board as there are a lot of SEO students just itching to sharpen their skills on a real site.
Take a month and teach yourself how to use WordPress if you have to - it’s pretty easy and search engines seem to love pages created with it (this site is built with WordPress). I’d also recommend taking the Search Engine Optimization Starter course at Search Engine College so you can better understand what makes a site rank well in search engines. It will be the best investment you’ll make all year and will help you get that gorgeous pottery in front of more eyeballs!
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On behalf of the tutors and staff at Search Engine College, I’d like to offer congratulations to our most recent graduates:
Search Engine Optimization 101
- Bob Schaller
- Dominique Neveling
- Micky Stuivenberg
- Laura Paradise
- Ellen Stender
- Bill Casey
- Bruce Gow
- Diane M. Pentheros
- Beth Evans
- Jeffrey Wieland
- Scott Spain
Search Engine Optimization 201
- Cheryl Hardy
- Kimberly Bock
- Laura Paradise
- Micky Stuivenberg
- Bruce Gow
- Jeffrey Wieland
- Colleen Lee
- Scott Spain
Pay Per Click Advertising 101
- Rick Hardman
- Evgeny Galkin
- Laura Paradise
- Bruce Gow
- Jeffrey Wieland
Web Site Usability 101
Link Building 101
Certified Search Engine Marketer
- Harshvardhan Kharshingkar
- Laura Paradise
- Bruce Gow
Congratulations to you all! Please contact your tutor if you haven’t yet received your hard copy certificate, Status Page or certification seal. Please stop by Search Engine College from time to time to download updated lesson material, contribute to Search Engine Wiki or check our Search Engine Marketing Jobs Board to use your certification to find a job in the industry.
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