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 – What is Pagerank? – 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.
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 Yaro.Blog – 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, Yaro.Blog 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
Search Engine Marketer
Great article Yaro, very professional!
I also believe the best way to get backlinks is having good content. If content is good enough, people will start linking from other sites so… and yes, it’s right; it won’t be happening from one night to the other, but its a process.
Some people thinks this kind of stuff happen in one month, and it may be true for some people, but for the rest; is a matter of hard work and self motivation to keep it going.
Cheers
Javier Cabrera
Wow, that comment didn’t come out right… here’s what it’s supposed to say (you can delete the previous comment Yaro)
That’s a great two part serious. Lots of issues and lots of wide-ranging SEO topics discussed.
I wouldn’t take everything Brad Fallon says (or any other SEO guru for that matter) as the full truth. I’m pretty baffled as to why Brad is still holding onto Pagerank as an important variable in SERP:
Google – 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
A quick Google search for any term shows that results aren’t ordered by Pagerank (you can have a PR5 site ahead of a PR7).
I wrote a little something (doh! not the best choice of anchor text 😉 ) about Pagerank if you’re interested to know where I’m coming from.
Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality.
Well, we’re seeing more and more that Link popularity is about quality, not numbers. A link from CNN or .edu is worth more than a few hundred links from a sitewide scrapper.
Regardless of who selected Brad as a presenter, those two topics are very much off the point if you survey most SEOs.
Anyways, content is king and your certainly providing some great stuff. E-J has become one of the blogs I look forward to reading day after day… keep it up Yaro!
Omar – I think you have to give Brad some leeway because of two things – he was presenting to people who perhaps have no idea what SEO is to begin with and PageRank is a nice and simple way to demonstrate how backlinks are valued.
The other point, and this is where I think PageRank is important still is that I prefer to look at it as more than just a number. The problem with PageRank at the moment is that is puts a ranking of between 0-10 on a very complex calculation. If you take it in it’s simplest form then yes it’s a useless tool that’s more fun than practical, but if you take it as part of the whole backlink strategy then I think it’s a good tool to describe how Google works. Backlinks determine PR, backlinks determine SERPs so using PR to describe how backlinks work is a good methodology in my mind.
It’s a fine balance between simplicity and usability and perhaps PageRank isn’t quite balanced right at the moment.
Are keywords in domains only important because when a user lists the domain, the keyword is present?
Does Google or Yahoo recognise that in a forum or comment section, if someone posts…
“I found some awesome entrepreneur and business articles at http://www.yourdomain.com”
… that yourdomain.com is connected to the keywords ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘business’?
I think having a keyword domain does help with spelling, remembering etc; but in terms of branding and even the availability of a domain, a not-so-keyword-specific domain wins.
Agree/disagree?
Thanks for the write-up, Yaro. Now that I have actually gotten my welcome packet and I’ve listened to the same presentation, it is nice to go back and read over your notes on it.
Hi,
I have this upcoming project re a business website. My boss who’s not at any rate familiar with SEO (I think he doesn’t even know what it stands for) would like me to provide a plan of action on how to make it earn a good pagerank. However, he would not want to do any on-page SEO. Is that possible? Making Off-page SEO without any on-page SEO work.
Any tips?
Thanks in advance.
Very interesting article, I’m following your advice for my web page in Peru. Gamarra is a very important commercial center so I’m trying to get as much links as i can get. Interested people please feel free to visit my website. Gamarra Peru . Thanks a lot
Hi,
I have gone through your previous article, and would appreciate if you can explain your 20/80 ratio theory in detail.
Also in this article you have mentioned that Google PageRank is an important factor in determining ranking of a website. As far as Google Page Rank is concerned, it is an evolving technology, and consists of many flaws.
For example a website named http://www.mixao.com has 12-20 back links and a PR of 4. The results in PR are cached results, and do not accurately display the current ranking of a website.
I think google will take some time to develop this technology to its fullest
Hello SEO Hawk – Read this article and you should get a good idea of what the 80/20 rule is –
What Is The 80/20 Rule And Why It Will Change Your Life.
Hello Yaro,
I have gone through that article, and that was the reason why we posted here. As far as Internet Marketing is concerned, SEO is a part of that, but there are other E-Marketing techniques which can prove to be much powerful than SEO, and can produce higher revenue in terms of ROI.
As far as 20/80 theory is concerned, it wasn’t exactly specified which techniques constitues 20% to produce 80% results.
The article is good, but it comprises of basic techniques SEO’s use around the world. We would have appreciated if some special techniques, and strategies were added into that article.
Thanks
SEOHawk – Yes quite true there are many other ways besides SEO to improve ROI but this article was focused on SEO – how to keep it simple yet get good results, which is what the 80/20 rule is all about.
This article wasn’t written for people who already have a strong SEO foundation, which is why you may be disappointed that it doesn’t have any strategies for you.
Also – please stop leaving links in your comments linking to your website.
Yaro Starak, your a genius! You remind me of a young Einstein.
Yaro,
Thanks for reviewing the Perry Marshall kit. I’m thinking about signing up as well, just to check it out. Never hurts to see what’s out there and I’m enjoying reading your posts.
Important to remember, that not all links are good links. I woul rather focus on getting a link from a top internet site instead of getting 1000 links from a low trusted site.
But yes, one should also focus on getting alot of low ranked links as well, as the total ammount increases.
The concept of page reputation is increasingly being taken by all search algorithms.
One good evidence is a paper released by a Google engineer: They call it trust rank .
nfolab.stanford.edu/~zoltan/publications/gyongyi2004combating.pdf
Very interesting article Yaro and a lots of very good information. I have a new site on internet marketing information and have been recently incorporating a number of the on-page SEO methods you mentioned.
Although I have not attempted any of the off-page methods, I still manage to realize some positive results from the on-page factors.
My site was up for a month or so before I realized it was completely indexed by Yahoo! I think what helpped was that I host it through Geocities under my private domain. I guess Yahoo will by default index sites their partner sites host.
I was very suprised to find I have a number 1 ranking for several keyword phrases. Although they are not very popular search terms, it made me realize the importance of on-page optimization. So I purposly updated the title, meta tag, H1 tag and all of the methods you outlined and realized a higher ranking on Yahoo each time I made improvements. I even moved up over 1 million in Alexa over night!
But, as you mentioned in the 80/20 rule, this is really just the beginning. Although all the on-page factors MUST be established, you must move on and concentrate on the off-page linking strategies.
So that’s my primary purpose now. Thanks for the great information and the inspiration. Boy, if I can get real improvements just from the on-page stuff, I can’t wait to see what happens with the off page linking!
Interesting. I have to admit that SEO remains a mystery to me. I seem to be 3 1, 2 or 3 in most rankings having been nowehere a couple of months ago. Mostly it seems to have been about optimizing keywords to page content and, I guess, links. But it still seems to be mostly black art….meaning mysterious!
Yaro,
I’ve bookmarked both parts of your SEO tips. I learned a lot. I was wondering what the differences were between Google and Yahoo ranking criteria. I find Google ranks pages that are far more relevant to the key words than does Yahoo. Also Yahoo will not change a page title or description even if the page has completely changed itself. (I have examples that are years old) But Google will reflect the page changes very rapidly (generally within days). Consequently, there is clear evidence why Google attracts more traffic. Their search engine is much more accurate, useful, and current. I feel if I can remain highly ranked in Google I will get far more relevant traffic to my site. Whatever happens in Yahoo becomes an accident. Their accident.
Thank you, Yaro, for an information couple of posts. I’ve learned a lot from visiting your website today.
I can see how all this would have once made money for people, but is it still doing so these days (with so many people trying to jump on the band wagon)?
I hope so. 🙂
Great article Yaro!
Great advice regarding SEO, Yaro. I’ve bookmarked it to refer it to my boss. We’re working for the release of a new lifestyle-change book and we need to get the word out a little bit more. He’s got his plans already but I’m hoping this will help us too.
Thanks!
Wow this is amazing!
I think I learnt more about SEO in your two articles than I ever have in all the eBooks. I’ve actually bookmarked both posts and will shall use it as my guide.
Thanks Yaro!
Calvin
Hi Calvin – I’m glad you liked it!
Hopefully you can go and implement now and get some great results too.
Cheers,
Yaro
Hi Yaro,
great information but I believe most of these info are easily available. In fact both my websites http://www.articlesjoy.com/SEO/ as well as http://www.articlesjoy.com/easy-SEO/ have similar articles. As mentioned, content is king, but fresh content is definitely difficult to come by.
In your opinion are there better ways to SEO?
I have recently read about Google sitemap and am wondering what is it actually. Whats your view on this?
Cheers.
C Y Lack
Hi CY – Sitemaps are okay – not miracles by any means but worth having one and in particular it’s worth submitting them to the Google sitemap tool so you can get indexed quickly if that is an area you are having difficulties with.
Yaro your words ring more true than anyone can know. I found that offsite optimization will bring in more qualified traffic to your site if you stay consistent with your blogging efforts, article marketing, and over forum presence as these particular traffic methods are great for leverage.
I believe you know more about seo than your leading on (good stuff)
whether its short term traffic your looking for or long term traffic, the key is to do seo properly so you can see results overtime.
Great read Yaro.
thanks for the tips
John L.
http://tendollars2wealth.com
Great article, I’ll definitely keep some of those tips in mind next time I’m tweaking my blog!
Again, super info here. Also, once again, so frustrating to have to become a scientist in all of this though! Nonetheless, you set the example for a truly quality Blog with quality info, along the lines of what I promote as the “Quality Blogger” from http://www.qualityblogger.com. Hat’s off to you Yaro, keep up the great quality work, we can all learn something from it!
– Michael Erik
Quality Blog Critic
http://www.qualityblogger.com
“The Best Things In Life Are Free”
I wonder how you square the idea of poor quality links (not links from directories but links from sites deemed low quality because of lack of traffic and PR now) and the reality that many “poor” sites end up as authorities and quality sites over time?
I take the approach that I am in it for the long haul, so I link as relevantly as possible when I write my own content and dont worry if the site I am linking to is an authority site per se now. Or does Google have a short memory when compiling PR etc?
Understanding SEO knowledge and techniques is very important if you want to be successful in Internet Marketing. This article contains very good and useful information and I have learned some new and important ones too today thanks to you.
Peter Lee
These are some great ideas Yaro, thanks for sharing. I think the key to success, like you mentioned, is quality content and building quality links (rather than quantity).
Thanks for the informative articles on 80/20 Search Engine Marketing. As a newbie in this field, I find myself going in circles at times.
Content is definately the best way to go. It is really great when you start seeing links show up to your site that you haven’t gone out and bought or traded for. It means that you are on the right track and that people see value in your work. Things have gotten a lot more competative over the years and reciprocal links have lost a lot of value in google. I am finding that distributing articles seems to be getting be some links but I am not sure whether they have helped with my rankings as of yet. Google has become so complex and there seems to be some sort of delay so ideally I would like to concentrate on the content , brand and building my mailing list and become non reliant on search engines for my traffic/ income.
Hi ,Yaro
Thank you for sharing again, This a best way to SEO .
Google – 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
Yahoo! – 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity
sirawannnl
Damn! This is a good post alright.
Learned a lot from this and I hope that Yaro will dish out more goodies such as these in the future.
Thanks! Great article that really drives home many points that I already practice. I just completed a website, that I have great hopes for, and I’m currently turning my focus to Search Engine Marketing. It is indeed a journey to nurture a website along and build its reputation and traffic. Your articles and your success is an inspiration. Keep up the good work.
I agree with the last tip about keywords in the domain. It really doesn’t matter, but I think it matters that you do own the top level domain (the part immediately before .com) as having your page hosted on any of the other social network platforms tend to dilute your own rank. Not much, but they know you don’t really control it.
The most important advice I’ve ever heard is have your own domain. You get what you pay for, but domains are cheap these days as are hosting options available.
I have been toying with the idea of having a link on my site (complete with the code) as a link for others to put onto their website. Would this help for PR or anything because it doesnt just say click here?
I wouldn’t bother with this technique, it’s very low leverage and won’t bring any significant results.
You should focus on providing value – that’s the best way to build links.
Now I understand why you place emphasis on outsourcing. It is quite difficult to stay on top of the various components that make a good blog. For a good part of today, I have been reading all I can about SEO. I learnt some good tips and I even tweaked my website a little to improve on what I had previously. But then, after reading your post and reflecting back on your suggestions in Blog Profit Blueprint, I have concluded that this is one of the aspect of my blogging business that I will love to outsource to an expert as soon as possible.
Thanks for sharing the 8 tips. I will put them to use. Cheers 😉
Hi, Yaro. I’m a Portuguese new blogger and I’ve been building my travel blog around your advice and posts. You’ve been a great help. I’m starting slow with my posts because everytime I come back here I go back to my previous posts and change something on them. I prefer to do things like this so that I can absorb all your excellent tips and than really start posting without coming back and changing things like the titles, the backlinks names, etc.
Thank you very much
See you soon
Luís
Yaro
I liked it but really there was nothing new in this. The most disturbing thing about SEO is the amount of mis-information as evidenced by a few of the comments on here.
“Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’”
In my opinion, this is the important key to success especially “Relevancy Link” is so important for help boost our ranking in Google.
This post really details. It really is almost impossible to find well-educated viewers on this matter, in addition you look like you be aware of the things you’re talking about. Anyone can take knowledge from this post.
Hi Yaro,
Could you please let me know that all these off-page techniques help me to increase in DA of my Gaming websites. As I am new in SEO and want to promote my websites at my own level.
Many Thanks.
Greetings Yaro..!!
Thanks for the incredibly informative information.
I am going to apply these techniques right away!