Learning search engine marketing in college
 

Since leaving school I have worked for many companies as a computer hardware engineer. I consider myself a lucky person as unlike many people I am in a job that I actually like, and look forward to going to every morning. Over the last ten years, I have noticed that peoples attitudes to computers have changed, where as at one time of the day it was a real skill to use a computer, and many people had trained hard to know about them. Now almost everyone owns a computer, or a laptop and nearly all the people who have a computer are connected to the internet.

I knew that my job would eventually become redundant, as computers were getting to a stage where they were almost as cheap to by as they were to repair. I decided that I had to go back to college, to learn and understand more about what was going on with the internet, and what people were willing to pay for.

I researched the market carefully and found that; any company who had a website on the net, had the potential need for search engine marketing. Search engine marketing promotes internet websites by increasing their visibility on a search engine. For example; if your company had a website that was coming in around number 70 in the rankings on the search engine, search engine marketing would be a good way of getting your website higher in the rankings, where people were more likely to click on it.

I put my name down for a college course on search engine marketing. There were a lot of teenagers in the class, but there were also people of my age (which is nearer 40). On my first lesson I was blown away by the amount of people who actually required search engine marketing (www.Vision64.com) and online marketing for their business to succeed.

I attended the college course every Thursday evening, and was taught all about keyword research, market research, on page optimisation, site structure and link building. Once I had these elements in place, I found that I was well on the way to understanding exactly how search engine marketing and online marketing worked.

By the end of the course I felt ready to start advertising my services. I already knew how to build websites, so I designed my website, with keywords in to make sure that it was found by the search engine. I followed all that I had learnt on the course, I put my website on the internet. Within a month it was ranking at number 5 on a well known search engine. I had an overwhelming amount of enquiries, and most of these turned into orders.

Although I have my new search engine marketing business, I also work as a computer hardware engineer. I felt that until the market for computer hardware came to a holt, it would be poor business sense to stop doing the hardware side of the business completely. So now I offer both services on the same web page.