What Would You Find In An Internet Marketing Textbook?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

Veteran online marketer Seth Godin wrote a great blog post on textbooks. It got me thinking.

If there was a college textbook on Internet marketing, how much of it would on the subject of search engine optimization? How much would discuss search engine marketing? My guess is very little. It’s not that SEO and SEM aren’t important. They are. But there is a lot of ground to cover with Internet marketing, items regard excellent content, website structure, etc. There are so many other topics that could be covered in a class as well.

One could probably fill an entire college semester on SEO alone. But that wouldn’t be advisable. A dedicated student would learn a lot more just by jumping in and doing it themselves. But very few people really want to do that. They’d rather pay $2,000 for a semester of coursework that will leave them unprepared for what they’ll face in the workforce. And that’s sad. Many of the top web marketing and SEM experts did not learn in school, they learned by hours, days, weeks and years of blood, sweat and tears, fully dedicating themselves to their work.

At any rate, when it comes to SEO, what you are likely to learn in a textbook is likely to be outdated by the time the course is over. It’s probably a good thing they don’t have textbooks for SEO and SEM.