The Web offers great marketing and sales opportunities for your language school or teacher training centre. That’s the fact.

Now, do you take the full advantage of it? The answer is NO. Ouch!

But this is about to change and I’m going to help you out with making your language courses findable, real quick.

Tidy up your backyard first …

Surely you spent a nice amount of your advertising budget on fancy graphics for your website, but how much did you spent on making the site usable (also convertable into bookings)?

Did you offer your prospect students:

1. Clear navigation?
2. Course search (site search)?
3. Help with course selection?

and then go beyond Google

Even when that wasn’t a ‘triple yes’ for you, go beyond your own site and make sure your courses are findable everywhere people may search!

There are other search engines apart Google, you know!
Bear in mind people also search on:

1. Video sites like YouTube
2. File sharing sites like SlideShare
3. Social media sites like Facebook
4. School accreditation sites like English UK
5. Course search sites like Courses, etc.

Make sure your courses can be found there! And as the new Web 2.0 services pop up, go and make most of them in all the creative ways you can think of.

Another good side of getting your course marketing information out there is the fact you generate a number of incoming links towards your own site. This in turn helps your own website become more findable in all other search engines.

If you are interested in findability and search I recommend you visit http://findability.org/

There’s 35 million status updates on Facebook  everyday. Each status is travelling at the speed of light through the networks of friends, or should I say your potential clients if you ‘Like’!

Now, do you fancy a bit of that tasty Facebook cake for yourself?

Facebook Social Plugins make it dead easy.

With a bit of code to paste on your site, and no programming knowledge you can add the ‘Like’ button, recommendations and loads other widgets to your website. All that at no cost!

With Social Plugins enabled on your site, users can ‘like’ or recommend your content to their friends with a single click. No registration, no login, just a single click.

For a great overview of available plugins see A Guide to Facebook Social Plugins for Small Business

Links aren’t called the currency of the web for no reason. Most, if not all search engine algorithms rely on link popularity to determine website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs).  In other words the more web links pointing towards your site the better position your site will earn.

Now, before you dash out to get millions of links to your site please READ THIS ALL THE WAY DOWN and save yourself some time and money!

First, Understand the Web Link

A link is made of an anchor (text or image you click) and optional attributes (parameters that determine link behaviour).

The Anchor

This should contain a descriptive text which will tell a search engine, and a user(!) what is it they are going to find on the target page.

It’s also good if the link includes a ‘call to action’ (tells your user what you want them to do or what benefit will they receive from clicking your link). Remember, users are more likely to scan through your web page rather than read word-by-word.

When they scan the page, they look for the next action they may take on your site, so you’d better give them something to do!

One is for sure, the famous ‘click here’ anchor is the worse you can go for!

Here’s some real life examples for you:

The Good

Book English Course Now!

This is nice. Tells a user to do something (to book), with (an English course), and to do it now! In addition a title case makes the link look more attractive.

The Bad

To book a course click here

This is acceptable. At least it tells a user what to do (to book a course), but doesn’t tell what kind of course!

The Ugly

To book a course click here

That is bad. I mean this is really bad. What does it tell a user about the target page?

The Attributes

Similarly to other HTML tags link has many attributes, but there’s one you should be aware of. It’s the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

nofollow aka the dead end

There are links you may want search engine robots (indexers) not to ‘click’. A rel=”nofollow” attribute can earmark any link as a dead end. In some cases this is useful, but then any link to your site tagged with nofollow attribute renders that link useless (it simply doesn’t count towards your number of incoming links).

Then, Start Developing Links

Links are not equal. Some are better than the others. Some are simply useless and some may even damage your site’s rankings! So next time you hire a link development specialist don’t let them take you for a ride.

Choose your Neighbourhood Well

Best links are from related sites. A web link from a pharmacy website to a language school website may be considered a bit ‘off subject’ .

Links from link directories are rather less than valuable -- who visits link directories anyway? Of course the robots do, but they can’t be fooled too easily.

Go Organic

Don’t subscribe to services that offer 100k links in a month. This will get you blacklisted with the search engines. Add links gradually so the numbers grow with the age of your site.

Get Follow on Links

If you exchange the links make sure your incoming link doesn’t have ‘nofollow’ parameter applied.

Action items for you

1. Identify ‘nofollow’ links with Google Chrome SEO extension
2. Share with your friends on Facebook
3. Leave your feedback!

The Google Accounts hardly ever make the headlines, except for times when there’s a serious privacy concern over how Google handles your personal data!

Yet Google Account is a single piece of work that most webmasters and search engine optimisers (SEO) use daily, often subconsciously!

I’m a webmaster and an SEO consultant. I’m also a Google Account addict and you should be too!  Here’s why.

The other day I turned on my PC and launched a browser. My bookmarks didn’t load, my RSS reader was sitting there doing nothing, my mail wasn’t arriving. In the back of my mind I heard the famous ‘This is it, This is really it’!

But hang on, what’s the ‘Sign in’ link in place of my Google Account login status?

Google Account sign in button

In that one second it all became clear. Google Account does a tremendous job for me and deserves some credit for it, definitely a blog post!

What’s a Google Account

There’s a great chance you use Gmail, or at least heard of it. Gmail and various other services from Google are all accessible with a single user account which is called, well, Google Account. But that doesn’t mean you need Gmail in order to use the other.

Google Account is an identity you use to access Google services. Full stop.

Why use Google Account

To finish off, a few good practices I’ve used over the years

1. Setup a Google Account associated with a business
2. Signup for all services using your business account
3. Share and manage access for other people from your business account
4. Access the services with your personal account
5. Don’t share the password to your business account, share each service explicitly

Action items for you

1. Learn how to set up a Google Account
2. Share with your friends on Facebook
3. Leave your feedback!