Mediarun Search Marketing News

Search engine marketing on the curriculum

August 10th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

search engine optimisation is obviously a vitally important aspect of digital marketing. So much so, that a search engine marketing tool has made it onto the curriculum. Well... not quite. But is has definitely got one step closer to being taught in classrooms up and down the country.

Why?

Because the University of Salford has just launched a course in search engine optimisation which focuses on adopting social media as website optimisation tools.

The search engine marketing course - its official title is the Search & Social Media Marketing Programme runs for ten weeks and will set would-be marketing professionals back £1,000 as part of a foundation course, £1,500 for professionals, or £2,000 if you combine the two.

Salford University's course looks at online demographics, information searching strategies, and pay-per-click advertising - as well as more traditional search engine marketing techniques such as keyword loading and web traffic analysis.

The university said that the course is "the first in the UK to earn accreditation from the global leader the US-based SEMPO Institute" - another provider of search engine marketing tuition.

Run by private sector search engine marketing professionals, as well as the university's very own Dr David Kreps, the course also covers aspects of viral marketing - a growing area of search engine optimisation.

The new course obviously goes some way to cementing website optimisation's reputation as a key marketing tool, but will the SEO course offer enough up-to-date content to offer students and marketing professionals a digital leg-up, so to speak?

Having said that, search engine optimisation is still under-utilised by a large majority of businesses and any means of promoting the benefits of the marketing tool to the wider business community is undoubtedly a good thing.

According to research by Thomson Local and Analytics SEO, 60 per cent of small firms are not investing anything in search engine marketing at present. And their failure to do so could easily reduce their competitiveness.

However, not only are a large number of firms failing to invest in website optimisation, but 23 per cent of marketing professionals fail to see the benefits of search engine marketing.

So perhaps it is time to put search engine marketing on the curriculum.

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