Hit by Google Panda? Problems with SEO? Poor ranking web site?

These were some of the issues my company Dayinsure had. Dayinsure usually ranked well for most search terms but in particular Temporary Car Insurance and Short Term Car Insurance, were always listed in the top 3 of SERPs.

Thanks Google Panda!! At the end of February 2012, our visitor numbers suddenly dropped by around 60%. Some of our more long tail keywords hadn’t changed but our main search terms had plummeted down the rankings. Our current SEO company, although helping with good rankings for our long tail keywords, couldn’t seem to repair our Google Panda hit!

SEO for most businesses is quite a scary subject, or dark art as some call it but as an I.T. company, we wanted to try and understand it. We looked for courses that may help us and found that the University of Salford run a Search and Social Media Marketing course, so I booked onto it.

The training takes place at Media City in Manchester and is a fantastic place to learn. And right from the start, you realise that SEO is not as scary as first thought. If there is one thing to take from the course, it’s the words, “Content is King”. Content is so important. Reading it, sharing it, liking it, tweeting it or blogging about it. How ever your content is used, it’s important when your write it that it is relevant to the subject and is written in a natural matter so no keyword stuffing etc.

The course has helped us to understand the correct way to implement SEO. I’m not an SEO expert yet but having a basic understanding of the rules and the things that you should be doing really help. Attending this course will help you communicate with your SEO agency in better ways or allow you to bring SEO in-house, just be aware that SEO is not something you should do if you have a spare couple of hours here and there. You need to spend a lot of time on SEO in keyword research, writing content, internal and external link building, social media and others.

I would recommend this course to anybody who has been hit by Panda or Penguin, or anyone who just wants to understand SEO. One other great thing about the course is the industry experts each week. These experts spend over an hour each week explaining their industry expertise and how you can apply the same techniques. You can even ask them advice about your own web site and they are more than happy to help.

Have you been hit by a Google Algorithm update or have a similar story? Ask me a question or just get yourself on the next course!

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