ON 10th Jan 2015, tinkeredge’s Cheok Lup was invited to share his insights and knowledge with aspiring entrepreneurs from the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) Young Entrepreneur Network in a 3-hour comprehensive training course on Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The session was segmented into 2 parts: 1) Introduction to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ; and 2) Implementing SEO.
Kick-starting the session with a probe -“What makes an entrepreneur?” – Cheok Lup invited the students to delve deeper about their role as entrepreneurs. Needless to say, in this day and age of technology, it’s highly unlikely that you will find anyone who has alienated himself from the world wide web and mobile applications. Hence, to remain relevant and stay competitive, entrepreneurs have to understand the “how-tos” and as Cheok Lup describes, to “bring ideas onto the ground” – that is to execute a product or service effectively and efficiently. Understanding the basic SEO concepts and technical skills that forms the basis of any eCommerce site is therefore a start for these budding businessmen.
In the first part of the lecture, Cheok Lup stressed the relevance of SEM, part of which SEO plays a vital role in targeting potential customers to take notice and be exposed to business eCommerce websites. Companies can’t risk to neglect the very importance of search engine marketing.
In this segment, the differences between SEO and PPC (Paid Per Click) were also explained in a comprehensive manner. This was followed by an in-depth guide to how search engines work through a technical lens including robots’ functions in page crawling, indexing and ranking. Students were also probed to think about how Google ranks their pages on search results pages and the importance of internal and external links.
With user-friendly content management systems (CMS) like wordpress and Wix.com, it is easily misconstrued that setting up an eCommerce site is a piece of cake. On the contrary, starting a website has many crucial factors that any business would need to consider and this is where the training course advanced to its second segment: SEO implementation. Here, Cheok Lup’s opening line was reiterated – that entrepreneurs have to be able to put their words into action and “bring ideas onto the ground”. And essential tools and knowledge like SEO implementation would allow entrepreneurs to actualize their ideas and products.
Cheok Lup simplified SEO implementation into three main areas: on-page optimization; on-site optimization; and off-site optimization. Students were once again probed to think about methods to attract web users to their site from the search engine results page as well as handling duplicate content, linking orphan pages and executing flash, JavaScript, video and login pages on their websites effectively. Moreover, Cheok Lup further challenged the students to think about long-term SEO solutions and how large websites like Amazon.com and Alibaba could be effectively optimized. By understanding the key areas of implementing SEO, entrepreneurs will be able to evaluate and apply the most suitable strategies that meet the needs of their business.
To top the session, interactive exchanges took place between Cheok Lup and the students where he shared his deeper insights on his SEO working experiences including the difficulties he had previously faced as well as his various technical solutions to individual problems that these aspiring entrepreneurs were facing.
Interested in tinkeredge’s SEO training sessions? Find out more and get acquainted with us!
