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Web Marketing School Full Review: Everything You Need to Know
Potentially one of the biggest obstacles standing between any site and effective SEO optimization is the inability to understand dense jargon. SEO isn’t always easy to understand. In fact, more often than not, it is utterly confusing.
The Web Marketing School aims to change this by providing its readers with informative blog posts and guides. They offer all of the vital details with none of the overly complex terminology, and as far as we can tell, they succeed in their aims.
What is Web Marketing School?
The Web Marketing School is a hub of information catering to all things SEO and digital marketing. It consists of a variety of blog posts relating to everything SEO, including SERPS, keywords, and direct traffic. There are also some ‘secret’ strategy recommendations floating around.
The centerpiece of this hub, however, is the White Hat SEO Guide, written entirely by the site’s owner Martin MacDonald. This guide covers everything you need to know about SEO and how to implement it into your own site. Or, at least, it claims to.
This claim is largely backed up by the sheer amount of detail the guide delves into. It gets its name from the phrase ‘white hat SEO’, which refers to any SEO tactic that complies with the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Failure to comply with these guidelines can result in severe repercussions on your site. Lower rankings, reduced traffic, and ultimately less of your prospective audience gaining access to your content. This is why the Web Marketing School focuses so heavily on white hat SEO tactics.
Who is Web Marketing School For?
The Web Marketing School and its many guides are targeted at anybody interested in improving their SEO knowledge. Whether you are looking for a theoretical improvement or want to enact practical changes, the school has resources you can use.
This is through the combination of both the many blog posts and the associated White Hat SEO Guide. The Web Marketing School highlights that the inspiration behind creating the guide was to remove some of the ‘unfamiliar jargon’ associated with SEO. In that aim, it succeeds.
The White Hat SEO Guide is separated into three distinct categories. Each performs a deep dive of their chosen area, without any of the overly complex terminology so many SEO guides can fall into. Despite this lack of complexity, all the information you need is still present. This makes it accessible for both beginners and experts alike.
Does the White Hat SEO Guide Cover Design and Content?
Yes. An entire section of the White Hat SEO Guide is dedicated to design and layout, and how both of these aspects can profoundly affect your rankings. It isn’t just purely about aesthetics. The guide emphasizes that the design and layout of your site directly impact how your audience will use and respond to your content.
One key element the guide touches on is accessibility. It highlights the need for all pages to ideally be reachable via a single link. This swift movement keeps your site feeling fluid and allows users to reach their desired information quickly. It also can help to keep your audience engaged.
The guide goes on to state that pages featured on your site with no links directing users to it are called ‘orphaned pages’. They can be disastrous for site rankings, as search engines have trouble finding pages that are not linked to. It may appear as though the page doesn’t exist at all.
A further suggestion of design featured in the guide is the use of a sitemap. This is effectively a table of contents made from links to your pages. It makes for easy navigation and significantly reduces the risk of any search engine not indexing your pages properly.
These are just two examples of the tips included within the White Hat SEO Guide. There are many more, in far more detail, with plenty of actionable advice.
The only issue we ran into was the occasional identification of a problem with no clear solution. The guide highlights the importance of indexing yet doesn’t offer a solution beyond introducing a sitemap. As sitemaps can sometimes prove hazardous to site design (visually, if nothing else), it’s somewhat reductive for the guide to provide no further advice.
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Can the White Hat SEO Guide Help with Technical Guidelines?
Yes. The guide goes into detail on how best to navigate the technical aspects of SEO. This is gratefully received as, so often, the technical jargon is precisely what prevents site owners from truly optimizing their site. It can be difficult ground to navigate.
With the White Hat SEO Guide, the Web Marketing School provides a resource that makes clear some of the murkier search engine guidelines. The guide introduces itself as possessing ‘Easy to understand language that is jargon free’ and largely succeeds in its aims.
Some of the advice it offers includes:
- Making use of a text browser such as Lynx
- Allowing search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs
- Ensure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP heading
- Try to maintain advertisements that do not affect your search engine rankings
In addition to much, much more. If you understand little of what is stated above, don’t worry. That’s precisely why the guide exists. Notions of search bots and text crawlers resemble something from a bizarre sci-fi movie. The White Hat SEO Guide brings these terms into reality, in an easy to understand format.
Does the White Hat SEO Guide Outline the Basic Quality Guidelines?
Yes. When in doubt, go back to basics. That’s exactly what the White Hat SEO Guide does with this final section it offers. These basic quality guidelines are all pulled directly from the Webmaster Guidelines of both Google and Bing.
These guidelines do not make themselves particularly clear in their original format. It is frequently jargon-laden and often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. The White Hat SEO Guide aims to add clarity to this process, and it succeeds.
Each guideline presented by Google or Bing is given its own header, beneath which are a series of paragraphs explaining exactly what this means and its significance. The topics vary from how to reduce the likelihood of being marked as spam, to overall user experience.
This portion of the guide is really where it hits its stride. It epitomizes the purpose the guide originally aimed to achieve, transforming jargon into clear messaging. It’s a valuable resource for anyone interested in SEO but feels intimidated by the walls of indecipherable text often present.
Does the Web Marketing School Recommend Further SEO Resources?
Yes. Several of them, in fact. Following your completed reading of the White Hat SEO Guide, the Web Marketing School provides numerous links to similar courses and resources. These vary from blog pages, to active SEO consultation services, to a mixture of the two.
Initially, it may seem to be an odd premise, for an SEO resource to actively link to competitors. However, it becomes clear that the Web Marketing School isn’t competing with anyone. It is a standalone, helpful resource that exists with a clear purpose in mind.
How Much Does the Web Marketing School Cost to Access?
The school and all of its resources are entirely free to access. There aren’t any hidden access fees, nor are there additional payments required to access further levels. Its many blog posts and guides are available from the moment you arrive on site.
Pros
- Successfully transforms various complicated SEO terms into easy to understand bites
- Entirely free to use
- Appears genuinely committed to improving general SEO knowledge without asking anything in return
- The White Hat SEO Guide is separated into easy-to-digest sections with clear intentions and headers
Cons
- The information provided can be limited at times, leaving certain questions unanswered, particularly towards the end of guide sections
Final Thoughts
Overall, there is truly little to complain about with the Web Marketing School. It provides an entirely free resource loaded with information that would otherwise be hidden behind dense jargon. It even provides further resources for you to check out if you still aren’t satisfied. In many respects, it’s a breath of fresh air.
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