Search Engine Optimization

Crawling, indexing, ranking - in that order.

• Crawling, indexing and ranking
  Three stages. Everyone talks about the third and neglects the first two.
• Checking whether a page is even indexed hands on
  The site: search. Ten seconds that saves months of pointless optimisation.
• Search Console from day one hands on
  Coverage, performance, and the errors nobody looks at.
• What actually influences ranking
  Relevance, trust, speed, mobile - and the honest admission that nobody outside the company knows the recipe.

What people type, not what the business calls itself.

• Intent before volume hands on
  Informational, commercial, transactional - and why a lower-volume buying keyword beats a big informational one.
• Finding keywords with free tools hands on
  Search Console, autocomplete, People Also Ask, and competitor pages.
• Urdu, Roman Urdu and English search hands on
  How Pakistani users actually type, which most keyword tools handle badly.
• Mapping keywords to pages hands on
  One primary intent per page. Two pages competing for one term is a self-inflicted wound.

Where the quick wins genuinely are.

• Titles, meta descriptions and headings hands on
  The highest-return edits on most sites.
• Content that deserves to rank
  Answering the question completely, and updating rather than republishing.
• Internal linking hands on
  The most neglected free ranking asset on almost every site.
• Structured data hands on
  Schema markup for courses, products, articles and local businesses.

The faults that quietly cap a site.

• Speed, measured hands on
  Core Web Vitals, and fixing the two things that actually matter on a slow connection.
• Mobile and rendering hands on
  What the crawler sees when JavaScript builds the page.
• Duplicates, canonicals and redirects hands on
  Including the redirect chain that leaks every signal it carries.
• robots.txt, sitemaps and noindex hands on
  The four-character mistake that removes an entire site from search.

Faisalabad businesses first.

• Google Business Profile hands on
  For a local business this outperforms nearly everything else.
• Citations, reviews and local signals
  Consistency across directories, and handling a bad review.
• Links that are earned
  Digital PR and genuine relationships.
• The link schemes that get clients penalised
  Named explicitly, so you never sell one. A penalty is far harder to recover from than a slow climb.

Proving it worked, or admitting it did not.

• Analytics and conversion tracking hands on
  Measuring outcomes, not sessions.
• The monthly client report hands on
  One page a shop owner understands, including the month it went backwards.
• Attribution and patience
  Setting an honest expectation of how long SEO takes.
• Auditing a site end to end hands on
  A repeatable checklist you will use on every client.

Pakistan's National Vocational & Technical Training Commission publishes a course-contents document for the trades it funds. This programme is mapped to Digital Marketing & SEO — 13 weeks, 4 hours a day, 260 contact hours.

Published by NAVTTC and reproduced here so you can check our syllabus against it. We teach it to those hours: 260 contact hours over 13 weeks, the same as the standard. Read the NAVTTC document.

Before you start

• Free: SEO Fundamentals
  Covers the first module. Recommended before week one.

Where it leads

• Content Writing
  Writers who understand search charge more.
• Digital Marketing
  The wider strategy this sits inside.

Roles this prepares you for

• SEO Executive
  Agency or in-house.
• Content & SEO Specialist
  The combined role most local agencies actually advertise.
• Freelance SEO Consultant
  Requires the business skills taught in the Freelancing course as well.

Interested in this programme?

Try the subject free first — there is no reason to pay before you know you like it.