WordPress and SEO Training Course

Students are traveling from all points in Florida and around the country to attend this 4-day training event, where elite instructors Brett Napoli (of Ambition Insight) and Benjamin Evans (of Domain Millwork) will teach students exactly how to create a professional website that is guaranteed to rank on search engines and will help jump-start an online business.

According to Napoli, “Learning how to create a professional website is now easier, quicker and more efficient than ever. With incredible tools like WordPress (a content management system for building websites) students will come in with little to no knowledge of building websites, and leave with extensive knowledge of how to create a website the right way, the first time.”

Click here to Register for the WebsiteSchool.com 4-Day WordPress, Web Development and SEO Boot Camp.

The intense 4-day boot camp focuses on how to create  and manage professional websites using WordPress, but includes advice on the business side of things as well.  Students will learn how to add web content and images, embed videos, create a blog, create image galleries and so much more. Students will also leave with an extensive understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why it is so crucial to creating a successful website and online business.

Instructor Brett Napoli is clear in his convictions. ”For web development, traditional universities are costly and ineffective. Not to mention expensive! For less than the price of one college class and in a fraction of the time, students young and old can understand what it takes to create and optimize a professional WordPress website.”

Instructor Brett Napoli and SEO expert Benjamin Evans are South Florida Web Developers and business owners with over 20 years of combined experience. Their knowledge of the Internet spans from Domain Names and Web Design to Search Engine Marketing and cultivating online business.

According to Napoli, “We teach you how to make more money online. It is as simple as that. You will save money on expensive web developers and maintenance to your website. You will earn more money developing properties and helping others build websites. You will understand what it takes to sell more products, attract more visitors and turn your website into a money-making machine that earns while you sleep.”

For Napoli, WebsiteSchool.com is a labor of love. He started teaching WordPress and Web Development in small groups in South Florida 3 years ago as a hobby, and has turned his tiny groups into a series of live events and a Membership website (WebsiteSchool.com) with a growing library of over 125 HD Training Videos that teach web development and SEO through online learning.

With the growing popularity of the Internet, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media, this boot camp is a perfect setup for the South Florida tech community and Entrepreneurs around the country to learn this valuable craft.

The training camp will be held Thursday, April 25 through Sunday, April 28 at Nova Southeastern University located at 3424 University Drive, Davie, FL 33328.

Click here to Register for the WebsiteSchool.com 4-Day WordPress, Web Development and SEO Boot Camp.

“We’ll teach attendees the key steps necessary to build a great website. This web development training class will save small and mid-sized businesses valuable time and money creating and managing their website.”

At Website School we know that business owners are often too busy to continually update social media accounts, and sometimes even if they do the results aren’t worth the time. However, for some businesses social media is an absolute necessity.  For them, maintaining a strong online presence and retaining friends and followers requires being active. For them, social media drives revenue and ends up as a great investment.

When we build websites we know the key is to keep it simple. Tech gurus know this too, so they have devised some excellent and easy to install WordPress plugins that can link your website directly to your social media feeds.

So say you write and post a blog on your website, if you enable some plugins, it will be sent directly to your Facebook and Twitter feeds – cutting out work for you and allowing you more time to focus on other aspects of your business.

With just two easy steps you can enable this feature for Facebook

1. Install Facebook for WordPress either via the WordPress.org plugin directory, or by uploading the files to your server (in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory).
2. After activating the plugin, you will be asked to set up your Facebook app (via http://developers.facebook.com/apps ), with step-by-step instructions.

For more information see the WordPress website.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook/

Another feature that is great to include on your WordPress website is having your latest Tweets appear in your sidebar. The plugin for this feature is simple, easy to use and will fully integrate your website with your Twitter feed.

Check out WP to Twitter
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-to-twitter/

We like to teach by doing. Check out an example of this plugin being used in the footer of this website and the Ambition Insight website. Linking all your online properties makes it easy for a user to quickly find your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

At Website School we can teach you so much more about having a strong online presence so don’t hesitate to contact us today.

You see, a webmaster’s work is never done. It is important to maintain and update your website regularly. If you don’t, customers may not be motivated to return to your website as they already know what’s there and what to expect.

How do I get visitors to return to my website?

Consider the same reasons you personally return to a website. You can keep people wanting to return to your website by periodically uploading new information, links to relevant websites and news stories, or creating and maintaining a blog that includes all of these things and also incorporates other media like photos, infographics, quotes, videos, instructions and more.

A blog does not need to be updated every day, though if you have a very high amount of traffic to your site it may be a good idea to hire a writer or content manager.  Content managers, editors and writers can create relevant content for your website if you don’t have the time. They can keep a steady social media buzz, keep your website alive with new content, entice new customers with free information and in turn grant you the freedom to focus on what you do best.

Should I get a content manager to create relevant content for my website?

Having a content manager has numerous benefits, some include reaching a different audience with a different voice, shedding a fresh light or perspective on your business and helping to shape how others might view or refer to your business. For example, when writing copy for advertisements or press releases you’d like to run, you might try using some of the words from your content manager to attract a different audience.

Start a conversation with your readers

Blogs and social media are great ways for reaching your customers directly and being able to communicate with them. Often, readers will want to comment on something they read in a blog or share it with friends. WordPress websites natively support, encourage and allow comments. This can open a conversation between you and the reader, which is invaluable when getting important feedback for your product or service.

Showing customers that you are available to interact can make all the difference in establishing your trustworthiness as an organization. Encourage your site visitors and social media followers to comment, share their thoughts, sound off, express their support or concern.

Create outbound links, cultivate inbound links

Outbound links to relevant websites are a good way of providing a service to your audience and also forging a relationship between other businesses similar to you.

A good example of this is if you own a bridal dress shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. You may want to contact local florists, hair and beauty salons, and reception locations and offer a link exchange, which in the tangible world would equate to something like placing your business cards on their bulletin board.

The idea is this: you create a link on your website to another website that could benefit your readers, and they do the same. Everybody wins, including the site visitor. By linking two websites to each other, you forge a digital relationship that acts almost like a vote of confidence.  ”Company A recommends Company B, and Company B recommends Company A.” This is made evident by the link from one website to the other.

Keep it fresh, but don’t flood the web with useless information

Content is king, but crappy content never helped anybody. It is always important to keep your website fresh by making small changes periodically. By spending a little bit of time tweaking your website on a regular basis, you will keep people coming back to your website and ensure their experience is constantly improving.

This also goes for Facebook, Twitter and all your social media accounts. If you do not update and maintain them regularly, people are likely to un-friend you not follow you any longer.

The less people you have as friends or followers, the harder it will be to promote your business through these powerful and predominately free services. A few posts or Tweets now and then should suffice, but remember to keep them interesting. Attention spans are limited.

Don’t share irrelevant information

No one is interested in what you had for breakfast or fifteen pictures a day of your dog. Tailor your posts and Tweets to what your company does. Share interesting stuff. Going back to the bridal dress shop as an example: try to give updates on latest runway looks or trends. Similarly, if you own a pet store, try tips for training a dog may prove valuable to your friends and followers.

If your website is about “real estate in Atlanta”, don’t write blog posts about the Atlanta Braves sweeping the series, Miley Cyrus’ new haircut, the new Jordan sneakers or a random piece of pop culture that you think will drive traffic to your site. Google is smarter than you, don’t try to “trick” our friend Google into sending you traffic you don’t deserve. I guarantee, it won’t last long.

Remember “empty” posts and Tweets will deter your friends and followers. Garbage content will turn off your readers. In short, create great content! Everything else will fall into place.

So, sit back, relax and enjoy your website. You worked hard on it.

Then get back to work!

The WordPress and web development training camp is hosted by Ambition Insight, a Fort Lauderdale web design and WordPress training agency.

The training camp will be held Monday, October 22 through Wednesday, October 24 at the Crexent Center in Davie.

“We chose to run this at the Crexent Center for a couple reasons,” said Website School Founder and Dean, Brett Napoli.  ”First, the room itself is perfect.  It’s just the right size and has everything the participants would need.  Second, the location in Davie is as central as you can get to all points in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties. We couldn’t hand pick a place any more in the middle of South Florida than this location.”

Learning to build a powerful website that is not only user-friendly but also search engine friendly is just one of the tools that attendees will take away from this event.  Says Napoli, “People will realize that building a website doesn’t have to take months.  As a matter of fact, once the content is written, a basic yet effective site can be built and launched in a single day.  We’ll show you every step necessary to build your own site.  This course will save small- and mid-sized businesses buckets of time and stacks of money on just the first project they are able to complete on their own as opposed to hiring a web development firm to do it for them.”

Ron Rubens is a South Florida businessman who has attended two of Website School’s previous one-day training sessions.” Rubens stated,

“The courses made me realize that the back-ends of websites really aren’t something I need to be ‘afraid of’.   I’ve seen the light and now I know that when you build on a solid platform like WordPress and use a powerful theme like Pagelines and then integrate some of the amazing plug-ins that Brett showed us, this whole process is MUCH easier than I had ever anticipated.”

One of the best takeaways from the upcoming three-day training is that attendees will learn in three days what has taken Napoli ten years to figure out.

For example, when creating a contact form for a website, there are dozens, if not hundreds of plug-ins you could use.  Brett has tried several over the years and now, through all those trials, he has found one to be the most powerful and easiest to use.  Simply learning about that plug-in and then spending 15 minutes discovering how to use it will save people countless hours of searching and work when they are building out their own site.

Naturally, the 3-day training will start on Day 1 with the basics before advancing to the intermediate level concepts discussed on Day 2.  By Day 3, students will be ready to build their own sites and discover the ins and outs of true, real, organic, white-hat SEO strategies.

Beyond learning to optimize the sites that students will be able to build, they will also learn how to build a strong and wide online web presence.  Certainly, the website is the core of a business’ web presence, but there are countless additional ways to expand and build your name online so that potential site visitors, i.e. your potential new customers can find you and get the pertinent information they are searching for.

This course is designed ideally for two sets of people.  The first set is those people who work for small to mid-sized business and want to be able to “call their own shots” when it comes to building and / or improving their company’s website and online presence.  The others who may find this training not only useful, but also profitable, are those people who want to either make a living or supplement their incomes by helping other businesses.

Prior to taking the course, Brett is suggesting and inviting individuals to become members at WebsiteSchool.com.  There are a limited number of free memberships available which give members access to a wealth of tutorials, videos, articles, advice, tips, “best-of” lists and so much more.  By becoming a member now and getting familiar with the content that Website School has made available, students will be that much better prepared for the October training camp.

Seating at the event is capped at just 16 students so that everyone will have easy access to Brett and the other trainers throughout the course.  Priced at only $435, it is estimated that the course will sell out well in advance of the October 22 start date.  Napoli has announced a $50 discount as an added incentive for becoming a Website School member and for booking before October 1st.

“We want to make sure that the students are as prepared as possible before the training begins.  To that end we have elected to offer the course for $385, a $50 savings to those people who show an early interest in the course.  Individual days are available at $145 each.”

If you are interested in attending, you can register for the course here.  Of course, you can also contact Website School if you have any questions or you can call Brett at 203-233-1686.