I recently had the opportunity to give a lecture on SEO to second year students at Birmingham City University. It was in computer room with every student having access to a computer during the lecture. This gave me the opportunity to get students to actively Google and discuss SERPs, as well as to get students to use some of the tools that form part of our daily routines.

They were about 20 students, a mixture of students from across the BA (Hons) Media & Communications program; a lot of them are web or PR specialists. They had had previous industry lectures so I assumed they would be well prepared for some serious SEO business.

I have included the deck I used (minus a few actual figures) and some of my assumptions and approach for building a deck specifically for an interactive, hands on class on SEO.

Approach

• If I spoke about a concept, I wanted to get students to enter a query into Google that showed it in action.
• I wanted to use as many concrete examples as possible from brands and companies they know. I am fortunate to have a large client which they are familiar with to use as a case study.
• I tried to avoid explanation of detailed SEO technical terms, and rather show them the concepts in action.
• I wanted to constantly bring core tenets of SEO back to how it affect them individually and can be used to improve their online presence - asking them how would you use this bit of knowledge or tool to promote yourself or your company.
• It's more important to be inspiring than to get every bit of information into their head. Just make sure that they know where to go and get future information if they need it.

I have taken learnings from other lecturers that when teaching, being relevant and personal is key to students understanding.

You will see that I did not want to reinvent the wheel by coming up with my own explanations of introductory SEO concepts and in this case with an audience new to SEO there was really no need. There are a lot of good introductory resources available.

The biggest benefit I could bring in this situation, to show students how the concepts that are familiar to working SEOs (SEO fundamentals pyramid, long tail, video search results etc), was to get students to interact with and apply the learning and processes to their own situations and projects and get their hands dirty doing searches and using tools.

Goals

I wanted them to come away knowing that search is a scientific process. That search can be understood, it can be broken down and it can be replicated. I wanted to get across the principles of goals, measurement, research, planning and execution and show practical examples of each step and the tools that help you along the way.

Delivery

This was my first run of this deck and in this environment; it took about two hours in all. I delivered it all in a two hour burst, which was too long. Energy levels were low and attention was wandering by the end. If I had presented this as a two hour lecture, they would have died of boredom. Getting them interacting and entering and understanding searches on Google is what makes it work.

The deck has a natural break at about an hour, after the general explanations and before the in depth case study. I will definitely split it in half next time.

I will be improving this deck after my first run through and looking for other universities with computer rooms to present at.

Teaching seo in a classroom

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I've included various acknowledgements in the notes, you can access those and my (rough) speaking notes by downloading the deck.

I started with some light questions "what's the biggest search engine, what's the second biggest search engine, what's the biggest search engine in China" just to get their minds going and asking questions. I introduced them to mobile growth and gave some pretty amazing growth figures from a real company.

Getting students using the tools that SEOs use

• To illustrate testing and measurement, I sent them to Five Second Test and Which Test Won.
• To illustrate viral content I sent them to The Oatmeal. I suggest using Oatmeal as the last one before breaking as students really like it and it can be hard to get attention back from pooping dinosaurs.
• I use a private SEO tool from Orchid Box for calculating competitor density - but I couldn't let them use it – it turns out a screen shot of a tool output turns is very boring, I will probably leave it out in future.
• I rely a lot on SEOmoz tools, and you will see a lot of screenshots. I had intended to the students all to create accounts and use the tools inside SEOmoz, but it turned out to be too long winded so again I used screenshots and talked through the tools, with the same issue of it being pretty boring.

I mailed Rand afterwards and apparently I could just have let everyone log into my SEOmoz account. I didn't know multiple concurrent logins were possible but I will do that going forward.

For the practical example, I took them through the high level creative advertising concept and showed how all the agencies involved worked together and how the Web Agency and then how SEO fitted into the big picture.

The main chunk of the deck was aimed at showing them how I use goals, measurement, planning, tracking and more on a real client on a real marketing campaign that they will all see in action in a few weeks' time.

I also showed them plan B, what I would do if plan A didn't turn out as expected - buying PPC, rolling out extra paid PR, stepping up tweeting and FB to try affect QDF and the possibility and risks inherent in paid links.

The four main lessons I learned

1. Split the presentation in half and give students time to breathe and assimilate knowledge.
2. Work on making the whole presentation more of a story and removing anything that is just cool but doesn't contribute to the story.
3. Try make sure that students can test and play with everything I show, I won't show screenshots and talk about tools that they can't also use right then and there.
4. Reduce amount of text and increase the number of images.

Tools I demonstrated

• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Keyword Tool
• Orchid Box Marco Polo tool
• The Oatmeal
• SEOmoz PRO
• Open Site Explorer
• Which Test Won
• Five Second Test
• SEOmofo Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tools
  
• Majestic SEO to look at backlinks

I just wanted to make final note is how rewarding this type of education is. It is very different to standing up and giving a presentation to people who are already familiar with SEO. You can really see the moment someone "gets" the concepts.

You are free to use any of my bits of the deck and I do really suggest you use a relevant example from your own clients. I put in a disclaimer at the start to say please don't share any of the names and numbers I show from real clients, I suggest you do too.

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Having now had a few days to reflect on the presentation, I am considering basing the first half of the presentation solely around a version of the SEO Pyramid to have a stronger central theme throughout. If you teach SEO, please leave some of your tips in the comments