ONE SYSTEM: Reforming Education to Serve All Students

Michael Kirst, Professor Emeritus of Stanford Graduate School of Education and President of the California State Board Of Education, comments on “ONE SYSTEM: Reforming Education to Serve All Students” report from the California’s Statewide Task Force on Special Education

4 Reasons Why Students Should Study Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

By Melissa Burns

We live in the world dominated by the Internet – whether you like it or not. And the predominant means of navigating through it are search engines – again, whether you like it or not. Which means that even if your future job has little to do with the Internet you will still do yourself a world of good by picking up at least the basic knowledge of how search engines work and how to make them work for you. Here are some reasons why.

1.     Internet Is Your Best Opportunity to Make Yourself Seen

Whether you start your own business, work as an independent specialist or look for employment in the company of your dreams, the Internet is your best shot at getting people to know you. Reaching out to potential customers or employers via traditional means of advertising is both prohibitively expensive and ridiculously inefficient. Internet allows you to do it at little to no cost and get to as many people as you want or need – but without the knowledge of SEO you will not be able to do so.

2.     Protection from Low Quality SEO Service Providers

Even if you are not going to work in this industry, you are more than likely to need SEO at one or another point of your life – for the aforementioned reasons. You may need it urgently – to set up a website that would attract customers to your shop, to organize your Internet presence to let potential employers about you, or something else entirely – and you will have no other way but to contact a SEO service provider. Now, if you have no idea how these things work, you will have to trust them blindly to do what is best for you – and in this case there is no guarantee that you won’t bump into a cheap, spammy SEO company who will ruin your online reputation. Knowing at least the basics will save you from it.

3.     Ability to Help Your SEO Provider

Ask any SEO provider, and he will tell you that working for a person who doesn’t know jack about how SEO works is pure hell. Such an employer doesn’t understand what is attainable and what isn’t, doesn’t provide the necessary information, makes unreasonable demands – and all this doesn’t simply makes the job of SEO specialist harder, it also makes it less effective. By having some knowledge of SEO you will become a valuable asset for your SEO provider capable to build up better professional relationships with them and organize your cooperation in a more efficient manner.

4.     Improvement of Your Career Prospects

When all is said and done, learning the intricacies of search engine optimization may really help you along in building up your career. Whether you end up actually using these skills on a professional basis doesn’t even matter all that much – the important thing is that it is yet another skill that looks great in your CV, that may come in handy now and then, that will help you create an image of yourself as a versatile specialist eager to learn new things. What’s more, you don’t have to spend four years in college to get real knowledge of the subject – signing up for a short course or even reading online manuals will be more than enough.

It would probably be an exaggeration to say that search engine optimization accompanies us in every aspect of our life, but not a very big one. As Internet achieves greater and greater dominance over traditional media, the ability to understand how information is found in it becomes more and more vital – and just as programming, it is one of the indispensable skills of tomorrow.

Author’s bio:

Melissa Burns  graduated from the faculty of Journalism of Iowa State University in 2008. Nowadays she is an entrepreneur and independent journalist. Her sphere of interests includes startups, information technologies and how these ones may be implemented in the sphere of education. You may contact Melissa via e-mail: burns.melissaa@gmail.com