Hello, my friends. My name is Bohdan and I would like to invite you to my SEO Fundamental course. Here’s the short description of it. The course analyzes the concepts of SEO with regard to their viability to serve as a foundation with further knowledge.
The one that would take the basics of and gauge whether or not it’s still viable. So my course has a central question: What do we actually do now? And to be able to examine this question I use a Socratic method that’s moving from one hypothesis to another by asking questions.
Socratic or dialectic method is the one that’s used to retain strong hypotheses and refute the weak ones. As Henri Poincaré said, all generalization is a hypothesis. So in the world of SEO where we think we know many things, whether we come with the generalization, we must ask ourselves whether or not it’s a strong hypothesis we must retain for the future, or it’s a weak one and we shall work to refute it.
As an example of such a hypothesis, to give you the taste or the course or the style, let’s take this one.
All optimization is geared towards the customer utility. So the customer utility is the object of all optimization. In such a case, SEO or search engine optimization also views the customer utility, but in the way it is apprehended by search engines.
It gives birth to three questions.
- Is it necessarily so? So what are the proofs of this hypothesis? Can we find a flaw or contradiction of it?
- Then, what is customer utility by itself?
- And finally, is this comprehension of social engines, is it uniform or different social engines might see things differently.
This outline above gives the structure of analysis that I stick to.
20 lessons followed by exercises of application of knowledge and of reading of the texts as well as group seminars allow for a reasoned and step by step learning.
So now I will give you the topics of the lessons for you to understand more about this course.
SEO Fundamentals Course
Topics of the lessons
1. What is SEO and where lies its limit?
In the first lesson of his SEO school, Bohdan explains the essence of SEO and how it differs from other domains like social media and traditional marketing. He discusses the principle idea behind search engines, the interaction of users with various traffic sources, and the importance of optimizing for customer utility. Bohdan highlights that while SEO focuses on optimizing content for search engines, the ultimate goal is to increase overall customer value without contradicting other optimization goals such as those of marketing and product development. He introduces the concept of a “guiding principle” that aligns all forms of optimization to reflect customer utility through the metaphor of a ‘mirror’ that search engines use to process and present data.
2. What’s an SEO-specific perspective?
Bohdan explains that the SEO perspective involves three worlds: pre-experimental setting (what the customer knows before visiting), activity within the website, and data legacy (the data trail left by the customer). He discusses how SEO provides unique and valuable data by combining SEO-specific (technoical) data with non-SEO specific metrics, which are the necessary basis of internally aligning knowledge. The lesson concludes with the importance of acting as if all stakeholders are aligned.
3. Source of knowledge in SEO
In the third lesson of the True SEO School series, Bohdan discusses the sources of knowledge in SEO and the distinction between knowledge and opinion. He recaps lesson two about the three types of experimental data in SEO and elaborates on how knowledge is derived. Bohdan points out that knowledge can either come from other people such as practitioners and official sources like Google, or be created by the individual through data-driven experiments, hypothesis, and analysis. He highlights that Google does not possess the knowledge about customer utility.
4. What data does SEO use?
In lesson 4 of the SEO Fundamentals series, Bohdan delves into the data types used in SEO. Recapping the core concepts from the first three lessons, such as customer utility and the data acquisition pipeline, Bohdan explains the sequential funnel of data acquisition in SEO. He highlights how both visible and invisible data points from crawling and indexing to user interactions contribute to successful SEO practices. The episode also discusses the importance of interpreting SEO data in relation to business models and customer intent.
5. The method of SEO: polls.
In this lesson we discuss the two levels of SEO optimization: technical and content. Learn how technical SEO focuses on invisible elements like code improvements, while content optimization emphasizes visible quality enhancements that directly affect user experience. Understand how experimentation plays a crucial role in both types of optimization, from hypothesis formation to data analysis. Discover the concept of polls as a method to gauge user preference and improve your search engine ranking.
6. The goal of SEO.
In lesson six Bohdan discusses the true goals of SEO (beyond just increasing traffic). He explains SEO as a scientific activity based on hypotheses and experiments. The lesson highlights four main goals: formulating and validating hypotheses, properly framing and facilitating experiments, disseminating acquired knowledge to stakeholders, and ensuring stable, reproducible results. Additionally, Bohdan discusses the importance of aligning SEO activities with broader company goals and challenges the misconception of increasing traffic as the primary SEO objective. The episode ends with a look ahead at the stages of SEO experiments.
7. What is SEO experiment?
In lesson number seven of the SEO Fundamentals course, Bohdan from True SEO School discusses SEO experiments. The lesson recaps previous discussions centered around data acquisition funnels in SEO and goes on to explore the nature of SEO experiments. It explains the dual levels of technical and visible optimizations and the experimental methods involved. Bohdan outlines the goals and costs associated with these experiments, emphasizing the need for a strategic and minimalistic approach to acquiring meaningful data about customer utility. The critical role of search engines and customers in determining the cost of investigations and the challenges of adopting experimental results are also discussed.