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
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I have implimented a change in title tags on one of my websites that currently sits at number 6 for its keywords. I’ll let you know if it creeps up the order.
Thanks for the advice,
Dominic
I joined off your affiliate link a month ago, but I never received anything except for the download page for the adwords ebook. I emailed them this past weekend telling them I didn’t want to be charged again but they charged me anyway and I have not heard anything in response to the emails I have sent. Very disappointing.
Hi Blaine - what exactly did you join, Perry Marshall’s Renaissance club? If you are having problems with any of Perry’s products just shoot off an email to info@perrymarshall.com or reply to the email you got when you joined. I’ve emailed and received a response within 24 hours. Is that email address you used?
I received my CDs and free report about a week after joining the club which was pretty impressive considering I am in Australia. I got a paper newsletter in the mail about a week ago too.
The 80/20 ratio has a completely other meaning for SEO reasons.
The big thing with those numbers is also how Google looks at duplicate content….20% difference being the ok line…anything under sets off flags.
How is perry’s Newsletter?
Yaro, yeah, I joined the renaissance club, but I have not had any response to either email that I sent to that address over the last few days. I will see if I can rustle up a phone number to call and harass over in the next day or two.
Yaro,
That is why you need to double check every affiliate link you may have on your website. I know you tested the Renaissance Club yourself, but sometimes things get a little bit durty.
Other thing you may want to add (NOW) on your website is a Terms of Service if you are giving away those advices. That is how people get sued!
Just my 2 centavos (cents, for the rest of the world!)
Great site, take care.
Blaine - I’m surprised, but not shocked. No company is perfect and there are times when customer service can be lacking. I’m sure there is a reason and or explanation (maybe your emails aren’t getting through) but hey, if Perry is giving you bad service he loses a customer and that’s his problem. I’ll leave it up to you to judge as you feel appropriate.
I have not had any problems with his service so I will continue to wholeheartedly endorse it.
Javier - A terms of service is a good idea in general, thanks for the suggestion. I think no matter how confident or how thoroughly I test and believe in a product there is always the risk of a dissatisfied customer, whether from bad communication or even poor client fit, which you can’t do anything about.
I’m not worried about getting sued because I recommend someone elses product. Because I don’t sell anything from this site I have no contract with any of the buyers. That’s another wonderful thing about affiliate marketing. True I can tarnish my reputation by recommending bad products (which I’m confident I will never do) but that’s about the worst of it. If I was charging for my advice that would be another story.
Dave - Perry’s newsletter is surprisingly good. I was expecting to get content mostly on topics I already know about but you can see the difference when someone has actually worked in direct marketing and tested things.
Perry offers techniques that are really simple and step by step (write a good copy letter - here’s a template - send it to a list - here’s where to find good lists - facing resistance - here’s how to get over the problem - etc etc). He sparks ideas every time I read his stuff.
His materials are definitely best for SME’s though, he can work magic with a company with high capacity but with difficultly landing clients. Also consultants too - since he himself works as a consultant his examples often reflect this.
Great stuff Yaro. I’m going to test title tags on http://www.AutoApproved.com . I’ll post an update here. I’m also going to sign up for the Renaissance Club.
Peace
Tyler
Hey Yaro. Once again, excellent article - especially the link to the keyword density tool. I shall test and see how they work.
Tyler - yes you certainly need to adjust your title tags on your autoapproved site. I suggest you move the keywords to the first part of the title and put the website name last, so like this:
“Need a car loan? We’re your source for Auto Credit! - AutoApproved.com”
Or even better, assuming ‘car loan’ and ‘auto credit’ are keyphrases you are targeting -
“Car Loans | Auto Credit - AutoApproved.com”
or since you seem to have a geo-targeted area perhaps you would be better competing like this so you only focus on your area rather than everyone in the world looking for car loans:
“Car Loans and Auto Credit in Kansas, Oklahoma & Missouri - AutoApproved.com”
Yaro - You’re right, you may not get sued because of it (I don’t really know, I’m not a lawyer! -thanks god!-) but having a Terms of Service is always a best thing to do if you are suggesting to people to buy something.
Don’t know the legal ramifications, but I know about people that got into troubles for a lot less. Anyway, great stuff!
Well, the Adwords book I bought was good and definately worth the money I paid; I just did not get what I was expecting and had trouble cancelling the renaissance club. I did get an email last night stating they would cancel my membership, and would make sure that I got a copy of the welcome materials that I never received, but there is still no mention of whether they are going to refund the second charge I had (previously) asked them not to make.
Buyer beware, as it goes. I still plan to make good use of what I did get, and perhaps in the future will look into it again, but right now it isn’t necessary.
Yaro,
I was wondering if it would make much difference to your search engine placement if you were to take the apostrophe out of Entrepreneur’s Journey, so that it appears as Entrepreneurs Journey in the browsers title bar.
What do you think?
[…] After recently listening to a CD by Brad Fallon, via Perry Marshall’s Renaisance Club, Yaro Starak has produced a list of 4 On Page Search Engine Optimisation tips in a blog post called The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1. […]
Dominic - I’ve also wondered about the apostrophe because some sites have trouble dealing with it. Generally though I have the Entrepreneur’s Journey at the far right of my article titles so it won’t make much difference except for the homepage of course.
Might be worth a test if I could figure out what keywords are worth targeting with this blog.
[…] In The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1 I covered the first four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques as explained by Brad Fallon. The first four methods were applicable to On-Page SEO, techniques you can manually apply to your website internally. The remaining four that I am about to discuss cover Off-Page SEO, which in my mind is a lot more difficult to control since you are dealing with external variables. […]
Weekend Quickies: December 10, 2005
Firstly, I’ve dumped QuickBits and remaned it Weekend Quickies - Why? Spur of the moment stuff and why not … it sounds better.
Well, what a heck of a week it’s been. If you thought the Chitika furore has died down you’d be sur…
8 essential search engine marketing techniques
An in-depth review of an audio CD where SEO expert Brad Fallon talks about ways of improving search engine rankings.
[…] Di particolare interesse è il post, suddiviso in due parti, che tratta l’argomento ottimizzazione delle quotazioni da un doppio punto di vista: rendere il layout di pagina piacevole per i motori di ricerca, e successivamente redigere contenuti veramente efficaci. […]
Quite interested in the item about site structure but there’s no real useful information on this apart from the fact that a sitemap is important (and I’d rather not sign-up for an e-course thanks very much). Can you elaborate on this a bit more?
HMMM I think this Brad guy isn’t all he claims to be. I just searched for wedding favors on google and not only whas his site not listed number one, as he claims, it wasn’t even on the first page. I then did a search for my wedding favors, his domain name is myweddingfavors.com and his site still didn’t come up.
Hi Jared, on all the searches I do for “wedding favors” I get brad’s site as either in the first or second position.
For further validation do a search for one of my key terms - “essay proofreading” - and you should come across my website BetterEdit.com as the first result. While Brad is not completely responsible for my result his teaching has certainly contributed to it.
Clive - Internal site structure mainly refers to the anchor text you use to link your pages together, your sitemap (how it’s structured), and how you link your pages together.
A few pointers for example are not linking to your terms of service/privacy policy/disclaimer on every page since you don’t want these pages to gain pagerank at the expense of the pagerank passed on to other pages. The focus should be linking to your handful of really important pages, especially from the front page so they get most of the rank points.
Brads course does go into this in more detail and I’m curious why you are hesitant to sign up. Brad rarely sends out email after the course if you are worried about SPAM. If you are really worried, sign up using a webmail account like hotmail that you don’t care so much about and see for yourself. In a worse case situation you can unsubscribe immediately after you get the last part of the course and never hear from Brad again.
Search Engine Optimization’s Most Effective Practices
Yaro Starak has two articles on SEO. Part 1 discusses internal SEO for your site. Part 2…
[…] Yaro Starak has written an in-depth review of The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization, a CD where Brad Fallon talks about ways of improving search engine rankings. The review is split into two parts: The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1, which contains on-page SEO techniques, and The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2, where off-page techniques are discussed. […]
[…] The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing, essential search engine optimization techniques. […]
This is an awesome article. I learned a lot of great tips and pointers. Thanks for the information and keep up the great work!!
[…] Below I’ve listed the techniques in brief because it would take a new article (or two) to cover the techniques. However luckily for you I’ve already written a two-part article series that covers these techniques in more detail. Head over to my blog, Entrepreneur’s Journey, and read part one and two of the Top 8 Search Engine Marketing Techniques for more education. […]
Yaro,
I’m interested in buying Brad Fallon’s “Stompint the Search Engines” package. I know that you recommend this product, but I was wondering how relevant it would be to someone like me who isn’t especially tech savvy. Based on his recommendations, can I make the changes to my site on my own, or am I going to have to take the site to a professional?
Thanks,
Brian
Hi Brian, I suggest before buying the product you have a got at implementing a few tests yourself. Can you change the title tags on your pages? Can you change the anchor text of links? How about using Heading tags and a sitemap. That stuff is part of the foundation of brad’s on-page materials, the off-page stuff won’t be as technical because it’s about incoming links.
If you want to learn everything in one go comprehensively, go with Brad’s stomping the search engines. If you have time to do trial and error follow guides like this article and test yourself.
I was faced with dynamic pages not being indexed correctly due to .asp?ID= tags. The problem turned out to be that the title and description tags were all the same, even thought the actual content on the pages was different.
I have managed to correct this using dynamically created title and description tags and have moved from page 11 to 2!
John
Very nice Article. No matter how many times I read articles, I keep forgetting about the internal linking optimization. You reminded me, and this time I will take action!
Thanks,
Brion
[…] In the process of building my site I tried to identify what were considered the best practices for building a site to help with search engine rankings and click through optimization. There were really two articles that were bar-none the best descriptions I could find both in terms of content and in terms of the quality of information. The first article is written by someone who will be familiar to most of us trying to make money on the web – Yaro. For the design and building of my site I focused on Part 1 of his article that discussed optimizing the On-Page components. Here is how I approached it, keeping in mind that many of these things are dynamic and will need to be tested and re-tested to find the things that work best on the site: 1. Title Tags – For each and every page, I have tried to optimize the Title Tag for two or three key phrases that describe what the page is about. For example, Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors. 2. Keyword Density - In a nutshell, the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. This one takes some research because you need to go to your competitors and attempt to match or beat the keyword density for those sites. The tool suggested was Ranks.nl to do this. 3. Site Structure - Sitemaps are important because when a search engine robot hits the sitemap page on your site, it effectively can hit every page listed. A good sitemap will provide links to all the pages on your site (or at least the most important ones), be simple (no graphics), and organized. The sitemap should also be linked to from every page on your site. 4. Internal Links - As Yaro mentions, Google treats every page as a single page, not as part of a site. Therefore, it is important that you include links to your most important pages. Also, having the correct anchor text is important – be descriptive using your keywords. […]
[…] DIY; Validating your own site is doable, but I recommend you spend a good amount of time doing some background research first. Checkout the articles on the seochat.com site (part of the Developer Shed Network), and have a listen to the Andy Jenkins (Online Store Profits) “Stomping the Search Engines” interview with Brad Fallon - who infamously achieved a #1 Google and Yahoo Ranking within a year of releasing his first commercial website http://www.MyWeddingFavors.com. Lazy ? Read Yaro Starak’s summary of the interview… […]
As far as 80/20 ratio is concerned, I have a little doubt here. Search Engine Optimization is a technique widely known to internet community, and most of the SEO’s around the world have 50-90% knowledge regarding Search Engine Marketing. We would have appreciated if Brad would have explained “Ratio 80/20″ in detail.
There are other techniques such as Email Marketing+Offline Promotion+Banner Exchange+Banner Advertising etc etc. I would appreciate if Brad could clear whether the 20->80 theory consists of above mentioned techniques or rather SEO alone.
Do keep posting these useful articles
Brad didn’t write this article, I did. I took his materials and wrapped it into the 80/20 concept. I think, SEO Hawk, once you get a grasp of the 80/20 rule you will see that I’m just saying there are only a handful of techniques to implement for good search engine optimization and the you needn’t spend too much time on it.
[…] The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing […]
[…] Make sure the Title tab is configured for SEO in the Header. See this article that contains a paragraph of the importance of doing this. […]
Yaro,
Great stuff. Especially for “smaller” comapnies who have limited resources, but multiple products. I’ll test-drive some of these on my Javascript Debugger page and tweak until I get the desired results. Thanks for the tips - they do not go unappreciated!