I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to get my copy of the Definitive Guide To Google AdWords at the discounted rate, however I’ve started to realize there is a lot more value in it than just the AdWords eBook, which I guess makes sense since Perry wants people to stay subscribed to his club, so he must keep dishing out good stuff.
Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.
Who Is Brad Fallon?
You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).
As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research – lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.
The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing
When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.
There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons – anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques – these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.
The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques
I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.
Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.
On-Page SEO
1. Title Tags
If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.
Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.
During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors – Wedding Party Favors – Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.
2. Keyword Density
Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works – copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.
To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource – go to this website – www.Ranks.nl and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density – how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).
3. Site Structure
Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why – he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me – it’s your sitemap – whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.
4. Internal Links
You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this – The Backlink FAQ and this – Monitoring Your Backlinks – How Popular Is Your Website?).
The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.
Two words of warning with this – don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for – usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2
That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.
Part 2 is now available – The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing – Part 2
Yaro Starak
Hi….
I want to know “what’s the main factors on which google ranking depends. And what r the basic reason of downfalling the ranking position randomly?
So how can maintain the ranking postion in google search engine.
in our domain http://www.a1-water.com, on water filters, ranking on page 2 but randomly it goes to page 8, but Why??
plz suggest
Greetings Yaro,
Thanks so much for this awesome information. I have signed up for the Renaissance club and look forward to receiving my material. I will let you know when I post my findings on my blog and perhaps we can compare notes.
Again. Good Stuff. Thanks
Derek Storme
Hi Derek,
No problem and I hope you enjoy Perry’s materials. It’s hard to find a better online marketer than Perry – he seems to avoid the hype problem that a lot of other marketers suffer from.
Yaro
Great article on SEO. Thanks for sharing .
I noticed your url title is different to the web article title. Is that on purpose and do you find that it helps??
Thanks for the other tid bits which is helpful to know
Yes Jermayn, it is on purpose. I often fiddle with the URL/permalink so it’s better for search engines, includes specific or different keywords, etc.
You can use the SEOtitletag plug-in for wordpress to play with things like that.
Greetings Yaro,
Thanks so much for this awesome information..
You are number one #1
As always, great info Yaro. Now let me express some frustration here though, not at you, but just at the way things are with the world of Blogging right now.
Bloggers have to become experts in so much stuff, other than Blogging quality content. I started http://www.qualityblogger.com to emphasize quality content and my most recent article theme is simply this…I Want Keywords Dead. Meanwhile, I spend so much time learning this, 80% of my time, and only 20% on developing content. Frustrating.
Anyone else with me?
- Michael Erik
Quality Blog Critic
http://www.qualityblogger.com
“The Best Things In Life Are Free”
I have been spending the last week or so redeveloping one of my websites, and forcusing so much more on SEO. After reading your post, I realised that is what I had been doing.
Good to see I am on the right track!
Well – Looks like tons of people have commented on this article.. I wonder why.
Great posts by the way..
Sam
Yaro,
This is only my second time to visit your blog and I must say that you have a lot of great stuff in here.
I have been trying to improve my ranking and this post might help me get through. I am not an expert in SEO and I hope that by following the 8 steps will help me reach top 10 for the keyword that I am using.
Hey thanks a lot for the info Yaro. I have always had a problem with this and it has hurt my blog’s performance. These are great tips.
I have implemented these techniques which I have learned elsewhere and they really worked. I have 2 keywords in the top 10 -12 positions. I will now have to work harder to get the other keywords ranked higher too.
Peter Lee
I realy liked this article: 80/20 rule of search engine marketing for blogs. It made me go back to my webpage http://www.paulopics.com and check the TAGS, density, etc… Great job. Thanks!
Paulo
Thank you so much for the tips! You remdinded me about seo techniques that I had completely forgotten about when starting up the rest of the business!
– Brendan
http://www.eco-homedesign.com
Hi Yaro
This is very good article, I have never seen before (80/20).
This is my second time to visit your blog (first time was “Blog Profits Blueprint”).See you again on your another blog.
Thanks Yaro.
sirawannnl
Hi Yaro.
I have read your article on the Top 8 SEO Techniques and found it both interesting and helpful.
I made some changes on my “webpage codes” and I am impressed. Up to one week ago, I couldn’t find my page http://www.paulopics.com on google search (Fort Lauderdale Photographer). And in less than 10 days, it shows my webpage in 16th place (2nd page of google). I know that it is not the ideal… but… UAU! I am very impressed. And I have to thank you for that. Sincerely… Paulo!
Regarding On Page SEO and Off Page SEO, if I don’t have enough time for both, I’ll just focus all my energy on Off Page SEO! One cool thing to think about:
if you search Google for ‘click here’, a page from the adobe website tops the list!
Thanks for the great advice. I plan to try some of these tactics in a few of my website and will let you know the results.
I have actually put “CLICK HERE” in the title tag of web pages and you would be surprised how many more clicks occur because of that!
Until 5 weeks ago I had never even heard of SEo. Now, im on your site looking and learning. Some of the information still goes way over my head but gradually, I will absorb a bit more each day.
Thanks for the tips.
Brad has always provided great products. I have been a big fan of them for years. Stomper got a bit expensive for me, but it taught me so much when i belonged.
Definitely explore anything he sells though, it’s worth the time and money.
Various HTML tags can help contribute to achieving a higher (artificial) key word density.
Brad Callen I think is one of the best SEO guy around. I bought his stomper CDs almost $300 bucks I’ve learned a lot from those cds… also I joined Stomper Network when they had their promotion but I was limited to certain things in the member access. Stomper Network that Brad and Andy created is great, monthly fees are way way to high.
Learning SEO is a must, the reason I am saying this is that you can drive targeted visitor to your website for products/services you offer and have big conversions.
Thanks!
http://www.WholeSaleLounge.com
In the above post I meant to say Brad Fallen, instead of Brad Callen:
Speaking of Brad Callen he is also one of the best SEO expert… I bought Seo Elite program from him, which is a good seo tool.
Thanks!!!
http://www.wholesalelounge.com
Its nice to read such informative articles helping the newbies like us. recently i stumbled over another great article by SEOZ87 aka H Vasco about onpage seo. its worth to read
http://seodocs.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-page-search-engine-optimization.html
Hello
This is a very good article and I am thankful for your tips. I will also recommend my friends, readers, & visitors to read it (am a forum writer).
Have bookmarked.
Thanks
Hey Yaro!
Thanks for the incredibly informative information.
I am going to apply these techniques right away!
Thanks,
Little Guy Network
Really nice source for SEO techniques.
Good information on what to link to within your site (not linking to privacy policy, etc. from every page). Never really thought about that before. Thanks.
I prefer sticking with link building, it is the most powerful SEO technique.
Hi Yaro!
You are definitely right with your post. Having a proper Title tag will really help in optimizing your site.
This is really helpful!
Junior
Technology Blogger
Good old fashioned advice. Still applicable today as it was 3 years ago. The basics never get old. Actually, I believe the rule of thumb is just to keep them search engines in the back of your head, but concentrate on your own audience while you build your site.
If it’s personal, then, like mine, there’s no real audience. So rank and serps don’t really matter now do they.
Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me for the next couple of weeks.
I’ve commented in blogs and applied anchor text that reflects my keywords, and my search engine ranking position is now on the first page.
Is there a site I can use to help me examine what my title tags are?
I understand they are important but I am not sure what to be looking for. Whether they are related to my blog’s name or the post title? Any direction you can point me in will certainly help.
Hi MBL,
it is depending what your page is like, but title tags are on each webpage. When you use HTML you can influence the code directly, by putting the tags in the section of each page.
If you are running a CMS or WordPress blog it might not always so easy to optimize them out of the box. WordPress nowadays gives a global option where the title tag equals the title of each post for example. But there are also some great SEO plugin which help you optimize these parameters.
Hope that helps
Greetings
Ben
You can add extras to wordpress such as all in one seo to get round the limitations of wordpress in its standard mode. This allows you to change not just the title tags for each post and page but also the description tag and keywords.
Hi yaro, after i much read your article, i think woh stupid i am to make a worst blog, so i’m really appreciate with your entrepreneurs-journey, it give me much leasons of blogging, thanks yaro
Hey Yaro. Once again, excellent article – especially the link to the keyword density tool. I shall test and see how they work.
Even though internal linking is listed at #4, I’ve personally had huge gains in traffic just by utilizing this method on other sites…
Also, although it can take a little work to go through and fully optimize every single post, it is so easy now with SEO plugins that are available for every major blogging software.
Hey Yaro. Great article! I take all of these into consideration when optimizing my website for the search engines.
Hi Yaro – Blogging etc is all new to me – there’s so much data out there that I almost gave up then I found your site – this article alone has taught me so much – thanks a bunch
I feel like I am very late in this reply, but its a good article, just came across it from Google itself, so getting this article ranking in the search engines is an awsome job, I need to start this blogging thing myself, it will really help improve rankings across all clients in all industries.
Wow…your article was written almost 4 years ago and yet comments just keep on coming.
This is the first time I’ve heard of 80/20 well maybe because I just started reading about SEO’s. My only question now is, for 4 years since the article was written, did Google or other search engines makes any changes in their ranking process?
For me an important thing is to use internal linking. However, if the google bot navigate strictly through your website i think he is satisfied with you and your website. This results in better rankings. But the keyword density is always more important. I want to point out the internal linking because many bloggers didn´t use this kind of optimization.
Cheers,
Volksphone!
[quote] “Wow…your article was written almost 4 years ago and yet comments just keep on coming.[/quote]
That’s because people use blog for spamming
Just wanted to say thank you for the helpful tips! I have implemented a few suggestions already, and am hoping to see some improvement for my sites.