Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

If you are on the StomperNet mailing list (you can sign up by filling out the form on this page you have no doubt already received news and links to more great free videos for the re-launch of the program.

As an affiliate for StomperNet I received a neat little PDF that explains what has been going on behind the scenes at the company. If you don’t remember, Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins released StomperNet about six months ago after conducting an extensive launch process that included releasing lots of great free videos about search engine and website optimization.

The program sold out and they grossed over ten million in sales, but even if you didn’t join the free stuff was very helpful, which you can check it out right now at the free public version of StomperNet.

StomperNet was by far the largest Internet marketing product launch ever completed, however what made that launch a little different was what happened after.

Normally you don’t hear much about what is going on behind the scenes and I often get the feeling many of the big product launches are meant to be one-hit-wonders – a huge lead-up process to sell a package, make millions and then walk away. The StomperNet team didn’t do that, instead they used the launch to form a business and based on what I learnt from the PDF, they have done a great job creating one of the largest companies focused on search engine marketing.

Here’s what StomperNet is today:

Read the rest of this entry >>

This is the second part of a report produced by John Webster from AIM IT looking at the key metrics in web site traffic reports.

If you haven’t done so already, read part one – Analyzing Key Metrics in Your Web Site Traffic Reports – Part 1.

Referral Report

This important report shows how visitors found your web pages. There are only three ways people can get to your web site:

• Click a link on another website
• Click a link in an email
• Type your web site address into their browser address box or select from their favourites list.

The first two should generate the vast majority of traffic to a web site and this report enables you to assess how your site performs against this metric.

The report specifies the individual sites that referred traffic to you as well as quantifying the number of referrals.

Links from other web sites

SE Referrals
A well constructed and implemented web site should expect 50% – 70% of its traffic to come from the SEs.

You should find that there are many individual SEs referring traffic to you. Every country version of the major SEs will be separately identified, so you could see dozens of different Google, Yahoo, etc. sites referring to you. Then there will be other SEs only identified by a number (Eg. http://64.233.179.104 and http://72.14.207.104 are both Google web addresses).

Other web site links
You may find there are links on other web site pages that generate considerable traffic. These are worth exploring. The links from other web sites are not necessarily to your home page. If you overhaul your site, the linked page on your site could be renamed or deleted, in which case the referring link would no longer be correct and you could lose traffic.

Links in Emails

This metric becomes more important if you use email programs to promote your web site. Email link referrals can be identified in the report, as the referring sites will have names like:

hotmail.msn.com
mail.google.com
bigpond.com/webedge/do/mail
mail.yahoo.com
mailcenter.comcast.net

Example – Getting it wrong
We audited a training company web site in Aug 05. An essential element of an audit is research to identify and quantify relevant search phrases actually used to find information pertinent to a client’s products or services. This provides a benchmark of the opportunity for the client’s site.

In this example, we identified 303 search terms used by Australians on 50,000 occasions in one month to find the sort of information the site contained.

Against this performance benchmark, an analysis of the client’s Referral Reports showed:

Clearly, the site had major problems but they subsequently got worse!

Of the 574 referrals from sister company A web site, various pages were subsequently removed that had generated 213 of the referrals in this report.

To further compound the problem, all links from the web sites of sister companies B and C were also removed after this audit was completed.

Essentially, this site is now only visited by the company’s existing customers who know its web address or people who find it from links on one sister company’s web site.

Unique Search Words Report

This report should list and quantify all the search words that were used in the SEs to find any of your web pages then click through to them.

This report helps you assess:

- Can your site be found easily in the SEs?
- Are you attracting the right visitors?

Can your site be found easily in the SEs?

This report shows the broad brush assessment of the total number of search phrases used in the SEs to find your web site.

There are many factors that will impact on your results. Three of the main factors are:

• Size and competitiveness of different search markets
• Size of your own web site.
• The ability of your site pages to rank well to relevant search phrases.

Size and competitiveness variations in different search markets probably comes as no surprise but web site size is a factor few people consider.

The reason is simple, all other things being equal, the biggest website is going to win in the SEs because it contains more pages that can target more search phrases than a small web site.

Example 1 – Getting it right
The best example I can give, that removes the first variable from the equation completely is a client who publishes two web sites, both aimed at the same search audience.

The characteristics of this search market are that it is quite small and relatively uncompetitive. Irrespective of your particular industry, if your search market has similar characteristics, then these numbers may have some comparative relevance for your web site.

This client has a corporate web site and a “newsletter” site, which is regularly updated with news articles relevant to Australian marketers and corporate PR staff.

Both of these sites have implemented web marketing strategies that evolved from a SE performance audit and traffic analysis we undertook for them and both use our SE-friendly web page publishing system, so these variables are also minimised.

Example 2 – Getting it wrong
The traffic reports for the training company referred to above shows these figures:

* The training company site includes a course database and course registration function that essentially generates a large number of pages visits when any one visitor uses them. We have subtracted these from the page visit numbers to provide a more meaningful comparison with the PR websites.

The search market for the training company is much larger than the PR example and approximately the same in its level of competitiveness.

If your traffic reports show a small number of unique search phrases like the training company, then you can easily see that your site has problems that need to be redressed and you are probably loosing a lot of business.

Are you attracting the right visitors?

I call this a Quality Search Phrase analysis. The information has to be extracted from the Unique Search Words Report but the analysis can identify major problems that when rectified should produce dramatic improvements to your web site traffic and sales leads from it.

Its purpose is to determine how easily potential clients or customers who do not know you or your brands can find your site in the SEs.

Here is what I do:

From the list of phrases in the Unique Search Words report, excluded search phrases that contain:

- variations of your company name and its brands,
- any clients’ names or brands,
- job and work experience search phrases
- general information searchers (Eg terms like “checklist”, “resources”, “guidelines”, etc.)
- Any other phrases that are obviously not primarily intended to find your site’s type of content.

Basically, you are compiling a short list of phrases that indicate the searcher is seriously looking for information about the types of products or services your site contains.

These I define as your “quality” search phrases. If these distill down to a very small number, then this could indicate your web site:

- lacks a viable content strategy,
- its content is poorly written or focused, or
- its pages have poor visibility in the SEs.

The following example shows the results that can be achieved when a problem identified with this analysis is then corrected.

Example
As part of the process of planning a PR companies web site overhaul, we conducted an audit on of their traffic reports in Jul 05. The new site was published in Aug and we audited the traffic reports again in Sep 05.

Audit Results:

Not only did the site increase its total visitors by 37%, it is now attracting more people who are interested in the services provided by a PR company, as is indicated by the 60% increase in pages viewed per visit.

The client also reports a dramatic increase in email and phone enquiries generated from the website after corrective action had been implemented.

The most important remedial actions undertaken in this case were:

- research that identified the search patterns people used to find the services of a PR company
- modifying web page content to specifically targeted the search phrase patterns of the target market.
- installation of our Compad website management system with its enhanced SE visibility capability.

As the SEs are continuously changing their page ranking formula and the web is growing at over 1 million new pages per day, I recommend you conduct this evaluation every three months.

Top Entry Pages Report

This report provides more important information on the visibility of you site in the SEs.

When a site has been planned and targeted at a wide range of search phrases any page of the site may be the most relevant to a specific search. Any page found in the search engines can then become the first point of entry to your site.

When you factor into the evaluation that a certain number of searches will relate to your company name, your home page should be individually the most frequent first entry point but if it is the only entry point or most people enter via this page, you probably have site problems.

Usually the most influential factor in this equation is the size of a web site but sometimes other factors can exert an influence. Basically, the more pages a site contains, the less frequently should the home page be the first entry point.

Examples
The following table shows the frequency with which the home page is the first entry point for a number of our clients’ web sites.

* Site F is the training company used in the Referral Report example. The high home page entry point figure is further evidence of the site’s poor search engine visibility.

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If you would like more information or have questions about website traffic reports, web marketing or would like a performance audit of your site that includes identification and quantification of the real search phrases relevant to your products or services, please contact

John Webster
Aim IT

There are two basic principles that web site owners and managers must implement to achieve a maximum return on investment from a web site. They are:

1. Provide information the web users want
2. Deliver content to the Search Engines (SEs) in the format they need

Site owners who observe these rules should expect 50% – 70% of their site visitors to be referred from the SEs.

John has been helping clients improve their web sites’ performance since 1995. His services include:

- Web site performance evaluations
- Web site strategic planning
- Web development project management
- Search engine keyword research
- Content management system evaluations
- Internet marketing training

He is a professional marketer with over 25 years of experience in a broad range of industries including industrial, consumer and service markets.

Clients have included both large and small enterprises.

- Quality Assurance Services (QAS)
- National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA)
- International Accreditation Forum (IAF)

- Network Communications (Public relations company)
- Australian Veterinary Practice Managers Association
- IM3 Inc. (Veterinary equipment manufacturer)

If you would like a free web site performance evaluation, please contact John at:

Aim IT
6 Park Ave,
Gordon, NSW 2072

Ph: 612 9499 3363
Email: jwebster@aimit.com.au

John Webster is a fellow I recently met through this blog. He came across some of my search engine optimization articles and instantly made contact with me. Turns out John is a super fan of web site marketing and SEO and runs his own firm in Australia called AIM IT.

John sent me through a solid report on analysing the key metrics in website traffic reports that he gave me permission to share with you. If you are at all into web site marketing I think you will find the materials in this report valuable.

Because there was so much content I’ve broken down the report into two parts. You can also find further details about John and his business at the end of the report in part two.

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Web Site Marketing: Get Real Benefits from your Web Traffic Reports

You would not dream of trying to run your business without a range of reports that show you how your sales and promotional activities are performing and your web site should be no different.

I find that many people are unaware of what web site traffic reports do and the essential information they provide so you can assess your online marketing performance. This article addresses the key issues.

What are Web Site Traffic Reports?

Web site traffic reports are usually generated by programs that reside on the web server that hosts your web site. There are specialist services that offer alternative solutions but I am going to focus on the basics.

Every time someone goes to one of your web pages, their browser asks for a copy of the web page file and all the individual image files that are displayed on the visible web page. The request essentially includes the address of the requester’s computer and the web server responds by forwarding a copy of the file(s) to that specific location on the world-wide-web.

A web site traffic program simply sifts through and analyses all these individual requests and responses and provides the information in a number of easy to read report formats.

Can an Individual Web Site Visitor be Identified?

Every time you dial up for Internet access, your Internet access provider assigns your computer a temporary web address and it is this address that is used to identify your computer when your browser requests web page files.

When you close your web connection, the temporary address you had been allocated becomes available for use by another subscriber to the same access provider service, so it is not possible for your web site host server to track the identity of any individual visitor.

Tracking individual users can only be done if the visitor accepts “cookies” and registers for some service when they visit a site, but that is another issue I don’t intend to address here.

When is a “Hit” not a “Hit”?

The term “hit” can cause confusion. If you say that there were so many “hits” on your web site, you are saying that this is the total of all files that were requested by all site visitors and in this use of the term, it includes all image files.

A web page file (also called an HTML file) is not like a Word document in which you can embed images. Web page files do not contain any images. All they contain is text – the visible text on your web page, the HTML code text that tells your browser how to display your web page and instructions to get a copy of any image files from the hosting web server that are to be displayed by your browser as an integral part of the visible web page.

In this context, “hits” has no relevance to web site performance as the number includes all the image files as well as the web page files accessed by site visitors. To double your total site “hits”, all you need to do is double the number of images on every site page.

However, some web site traffic reports may use “hits” in a context that is relevant. Some may report visits to web page files (also called URLs or unique resource locators) as “hits”. In this situation, because all other file types are excluded, “hits” are relevant as the reported number is showing how many times a web page file was requested.

Limitations of Web Site Traffic Reports

The best use of your reports is for trend analysis.

Web site traffic reports are 100% accurate but they are not 100% real. Confused? Following are some of the factors that cloud the reality picture.

Visits to your web site are not all real people. There are many programs released on the web to visit web sites. These include the “goodies” like search engine (SE) robots that automatically crawl the web requesting copies of web page files and the “baddies”, like “sniffer” robots that may visit to seek email addresses for “spam” email generation. You would expect your traffic report program to be installed to exclude reporting visits from the major SE robots but it is not practical to identify and exclude the many other possible non-real visitors.

The visitors by country traffic report is another one that has limitations. Some Internet access providers can assign their subscribers with temporary computer identification that does not enable interpretation by the traffic analysis program. This may result in 15% – 30% of visits whose country of origin cannot be determined.

Then there are the large corporations who often use worldwide networks. In this situation, any employee in any location can be accessing the web via the country location of the head office and will be identified by your traffic reports as originating from that country.

What Web Site Traffic Reports are Essential?

I am focusing on the basics and I regard this as the absolutely essential web site traffic reporting information you need to manage your web site and online marketing.

Online Web Site Traffic reports are typically updated daily or weekly and you would expect to be able to access current month and a monthly history of web site activity for the past year.

You will want access to reports for each month that show:

The big picture – Number of web site visitors, number of pages visited and pages viewed per visit

• Most viewed web pages/download files and number of visits/accesses to them
• Referral report – how many visitors came from search engines and other web sites
• Unique search words – ALL the search phrases used to find your site in the SEs
• Top entry pages – which of your web pages were the first point of entry to your site

The significance of these individual reports is discussed below.

Traffic Reports – The Big Picture

You would want to track the number of web site visitors, the number of pages visited, the pages viewed per visit and the pages viewed per site size at least monthly.

The other element you need to record is the size of your web site, its growth and when content was added, as this will impact on the pages viewed per visit over time.

The need for tracking the total visits and pages/download files viewed/accessed should be obvious but the pages viewed per visit and the pages viewed per site size, warrants some explanation.

Example – Getting it right

The following web site traffic figures are taken from a site that targets Australian marketers and corporate PR staff.

Pages viewed per visit, provides an indirect assessment of the relevance of the site’s content to the visitors. If the SEs are referring a lot of traffic to a site, it is quite possible that many visitors are clicking through but finding the site content not relevant to their specific needs. In this case, you might find a low number of pages viewed per visit, as these visitors will hit their “back” buttons pretty quickly.

The figures for this site suggest the content is relevant to many viewers and the consistent increase in pages viewed per visit suggests the site is targeting the desired audience. However, this metric alone can mask problems that the pages viewed per site size may disclose.

This site consistently increases the number of published web pages and by this analysis there was a 5% decline in the pages viewed relative to the size of the web site in Dec 05.

There are a number of possible explanations for this drop. Typically, there is a total down turn in web usage by Australians in Dec/Jan and the December figure may simply reflect this.

Another explanation may give cause for concern.

Google implemented major changes in Oct 05. They changed how their SE ranks search results and they approximately doubled the number of web pages that they index. When SEs implement changes of this magnitude, pages from your site that previously ranked high to relevant search phrases can drop dramatically in the results ranking and cause a significant down turn in your site traffic.

If this was the reason for the decline, then web site remedial action may have been essential.

Most Viewed Web Pages (or URLs) Report

This is one of those reports where “hits” = pages viewed or download files accessed.

Its primary use is to identify what areas of your site are considered most relevant to site visitors. If people do not go to the pages that are important to you, it may indicate a problem with your site structure, descriptive content or SE targeting.

Possible problems:

Are the links to the pages you want visited buried too deep?
Is the link text to them obscure and unclear?
Do you include cross-links to them in the pages people are visiting most frequently?
Do your important pages perform well in the SEs?

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Continue to Part 2 – Analyzing Key Metrics in Your Web Site Traffic Reports.

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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.

As I mentioned in part one, these techniques come from a special seminar recording that I received as part of my welcome package for joining Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club.

Off Page SEO

If you are at all familiar with search engine optimization you are probably more interested in Off-Page techniques. With a bit of study and practice you can quickly grasp the most important On-Page variables to play with on your website. There is always more you can do of course, but as long as we are talking 80/20 rules there are only a handful of really important On-Page things and most of them were covered in part one of this article series.

Off-Page SEO in my mind is more important than On-Page. You can get your On-Page content perfectly optimized but without any good Off-Page SEO your On-Page efforts are wasted. No website can be a success in natural search engine results unless there are links flowing into it. This is what Off-Page SEO is all about, getting good quality links coming through.

Quite frankly I don’t believe there are any consistent, easy and affordable ways to conduct Off-Page SEO, and that is why I was so interested to hear what Brad was going to cover in his presentation. To be honest I wasn’t blown away by his comments. It didn’t cover anything new to me but I have been reading about SEO for a number of years, including some of Brad’s other materials, but it did reaffirm what I currently practice in my own Off-Page SEO activities and it’s always good to be reminded of what is smart practice.

Let’s go through the final four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques so you can also do a mental check list and be certain you are following what the experts do.

5. Links and PageRank

Brad mumbled this first point out but later it was clarified that he said links. Really his Off-Page SEO technique discussion was more of a gradual break down than a top 4 list, with each point flowing into the next (which you will see is mimicked in this article) so the first place to logically start is links.

Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.

PageRank

If you read my blog you should be well and truly familiar with PageRank. Most of my SEO posts are laden with the term but just in case you don’t know about PageRank head over and read this article to get yourself introduced to the topic – PageRank Explained – Keeping SEO Simple – this is one of my most popular articles and it should answer your basic questions.

Brad Fallon did not do anything more than a basic introduction to PageRank but he did make one interesting comment that I think is worth repeating. He gave a typical scenario of a person conducting search engine marketing for a website (or a company hired to do so), which usually starts with submitting to directories and hunting around for link exchange partners. Not exactly the most effective means of SEO because you tend to get low quality and low PageRank incoming links.

Brad went on to note the perils of over optimizing, which often happens when techniques like low quality link exchanges and free directories are over used, generating thousands duplicate anchor text incoming links from sites with low PageRank. He stated that the search engines don’t reward these techniques well, but strangely enough these are often considered the foundations of SEO campaigning but don’t lead to great results.

What Is A Good SEO Plan?

A more sound search engine marketing strategy is all about quality over quantity. Get your site listed in the best directories – DMOZ (the open directory project) and Yahoo! – and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results.

Brad pointed out that 1000 low quality and low PageRank backlinks generated in a short period of time will not be nearly as good as a handful of high PageRank incoming links added over many months. The emphasis is on oh-na-tur-al. Don’t follow the crowd and exchange links with anybody and everyone that comes asking for a link (perhaps I should drop my link exchange practices for this blog?) and don’t spend all your time asking for links from any site you can find that is remotely relevant to yours.

How To Get High Quality Links

It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something. Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a full-proof method for gaining quality links other than what I have already written about before and what is repeated over and over again all over the Internet – Content is King. The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.

If you need a practical example of how to get high quality backlinks using content read the second part of this article – Smarter Online Marketing. This article explains how one of my blog articles enjoyed some major exposure around the web resulting in lots of links.

In the case of commercial sites the same rules hold true, content will bring in links and visitors. With a commercial site the secret sauce is great content that is tightly aligned with your target market. Whitepapers, articles, free reports, resources, anything and everything you can come up with that will bring your market to your site. If you have just launched a new site put together a whiz-bang whitepaper, it doesn’t have to be too long, just a few pages of really really good stuff and make it available on your site for free.

Once you have the resources on your site you just need to get out there and tell everyone. At the moment one of the best ways is to comment on blogs and forums where your target market congregate. As I mentioned above, if one popular site owner reads your whitepaper, thinks it’s great and tells her audience, your job may be done already. This alone may bring in hundreds of backlinks and definitely lots of real visitors. It’s not easy but good content will lead to good results – it’s almost guaranteed!

6. Page Reputation

Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!

Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link. The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites. If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.

That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.

7. Anchor Text

Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.

This issue is all about your keywords. First you have to know what keywords you want people to use to link to your pages and then you need to figure out ways to make sure people use those keywords. For the basic link exchanges you usually communicate with the person providing you with a link and stipulate what anchor text to use. However most of the valuable links will come in response to you writing some good content and it will be quite random, the linking person won’t approach you to ask how they should link to you, they will just slap up a link as they feel appropriate.

In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles. Yes usability and marketing comes first – you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.

I wouldn’t stress about external anchor text too much otherwise you can become bogged down in little details. Often the people linking to you will use completely random text that means absolutely nothing (for example – visit Entrepreneur’s Journey – click here – “click here” is not good anchor text) but at least will bring in human visitors. Just stay consciously aware of the importance of keywords in anchor text whenever you produce new content.

8. Link Popularity

Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.

The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.

Google – 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
Yahoo! – 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity

Now I can’t verify that in any manner but it does make for some interesting discussion. This shows that Google cares more about quality and Yahoo! cares more about quantity, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that. I’ll leave it up to you to test this theory on your sites.

Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’

Before I wrap this article up I want to make one comment regarding how relevant backlinks have to be and whether keywords in domain names matter. Brad made some interesting comments about these topics.

My assumption was that relevancy meant that the pages your incoming links come from should be relevant to a pretty high degree, for example, Entrepreneur’s Journey would appreciate links from business, marketing, SEO and entrepreneurship sites but universities, sports clubs and cooking sites would not be relevant. Brad stated that Google’s relevancy scope is quite wide, as wide as the top categories in the DMOZ directory. A site that on first inspection may not be relevant may actually in fact offer some relevancy even if the connection is obscure or drilled down (is every link from a blog relevant to a blog simply because they all belong in the “blog” category? I think not). It’s a hard thing to judge given that determining whether a result (say a search engine ranking increase) has a direct correlation to a single backlink is next to impossible.

What was really interesting and actually makes total sense is what Brad said about domain names. One of the age old questions in SEO is whether keywords in your domain name are important. Brad straight out said that the Google algorithms do not consider keywords in the domain name, however when people link to you they often use your domain name and if your keywords are in your domain name then the anchor text people use to link to you will contain your keywords. In a round about way, yes, keywords in domain names matter.

Conclusion

There you have it, the top 8 search engine optimization techniques as presented by Brad Fallon, one of the web’s most respected search engine marketers, along with lots of additional commentary thrown in from yours truly. For some people there won’t have been much new material but what these two articles do provide is a solid list of the 80/20 variables that you should work on if your organic search engine results are business critical. For solopreneurs with little time on you hands knowing what the key two-to-three things you need to worry about makes for efficient business.

A few people have emailed me questioning the validity of Brad Fallon and I can say one thing only – Jay Abraham would not have selected him as the presenter on search engine optimization if he wasn’t the real deal. If you don’t have any confidence in Jay Abraham then perhaps you need to start studying business and marketing.

Take care everyone,

Yaro Starak
Search Engine Marketer

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