Monte with Bruce Clay
07/05/2006 - Monte Cahn
Mr. Clay has operated as an executive with several high technology businesses, and comes from a long career as a technical manager with Boole and Babbage, Amdahl, Convergent Technologies, Acer America, and since 1996 in the Internet Business Consulting area. Mr. Clay holds a BS in Math/Computer Science and a MBA from Pepperdine University, has had many articles published, has been a speaker at over 100 sessions, and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, PC Week, Wired Magazine, Smart Money, several books, and many more publications. He has personally authored many advanced search engine optimization tools that are available from his company web sites.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, everyone, welcome to Domain Masters. Happy 5th of July, day after Fourth of July. I can see people are still partying, as the chat room’s a little bit light right now, but I know it’ll fill up in a little bit. We have another great live show this week. We are going to interview Bruce Clay, who’s the president of BruceClay.com, one of the leading SEO firms in the entire world. Since 1996, BruceClay.com has been one of the leading search engine optimization Web designations. This site, offering step-by-step methodologies, including free interactive tools on all aspects of search engine optimization, and ranks near the top of all websites visited. And, Bruce is going to give us some information about how to be better doing some SEO stuff. Since been awhile since we’ve had a SEO guy on and I had Bruce on briefly at WebmasterWorld in Las Vegas almost a year ago and so it’ll be nice to touch base with him again.
Also, just a reminder that we will be at both the SES event in Miami starting on Sunday or Monday of this week; and also the Affiliate Summit, which we covered in last week’s show. And, uhm, which is going to be two great conferences to participate in.
We’re going to do a couple commercials, pay some bills and be back on with Bruce Clay. Stay tuned.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Domain Masters. And welcome back to the show. Again, my first guest, who is the president, Bruce Clay, is president of BruceClay.com. Bruce has operated as an executive with several high technology businesses. He has many articles published and has been a speaker at over 100 sessions. He’s been quote in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, PC Week, Wired Magazine, Smart Money; he speaks at SES, WebmasterWorld. He’s one of the known authorities at search engine optimization and provides a great web site with great tools to help folks that want to do better at what they do in terms of search engine optimization. Ah, Bruce, welcome back to the show.
Bruce: Thank you.
Monte: Last time I had you on, I believe, was just a short interview that we had live at the WebmasterWorld Conference in Las Vegas – I think that was in November, correct?
Bruce: Correct. It was right next to the bar. I remember it well.
Monte: Yeah, right next to the bar; that’s right. That’s right. And so, I haven’t had an SEO show in quite some time and thought you were the best person to have on, so I really appreciate you fitting us into the schedule as I know you’ve been off of one trip and onto another soon. I understand that you’re going to Africa, huh?
Bruce: Yes, I’m going to Cape Town actually, to do three-and-a-half days of training, so . . .
Monte: Oh, wow, training with a client?
Bruce: [inaudible] trip . . . Pardon me?
Monte: Training with a client?
Bruce: Yes.
Monte: Well, I went to South Africa for my honeymoon, so it’s a great place. And I went to Cape Town, spent about 7 days there. Make sure you hit the wineries.
Bruce: [laughs] Oh, I’m sure I will.
Monte: [laughs]. I’m sure you will. So, give us a little bit of I . . . bring us up to speed about how you got into the business that you’re in, you know, how long you’ve been doing what you’re doing and then we’ll get into more specifics about BruceClay.com and some of your clients and how folks that are listening can do a better job at SEO.
Bruce: That sounds fine. I think a lot of people know, certainly, the name, they’ve seen the website, but they may not know that it was around since ’96. I started very early in ’96 building the site and pulling things together. Really, it was going to be me, my notebook computer, a Corona and the beach. I was just going to consult, it was going to be something small. The Internet was just getting going; Al Gore was inventing it . . .
Monte: [laughs]
Bruce: . . . . at that particular point in time.
Monte: Now, were you doing SEO way back then?
Bruce: I started doing SEO way back then. Actually, back then it wasn’t even called SEO. The word “optimization” was sort of a carry-over from one of my prior lifetimes and I started calling it SEO pretty early on. But it wasn’t SEO back when I first started. It wasn’t until I actually discovered that you could tune up a website, optimize a website, and have it actually rank better in the search engines that I started calling it SEO. My prior lifetimes were in the mainframe performance optimization business, so search engine optimization was a pretty natural thing to refer to it as, so I started doing that. Danny Sullivan actually had given me credit for inventing the phrase . . .
Monte: Oh, wow, so [inaudible] . . .
Bruce: . . . one of the early on guys.
Monte: So, the phrase actually came from you, SEO?
Bruce: Well . . . I don’t remember anybody ever using it and Danny did research. He went back through all his emails and postings and everything, all the way back to the beginning – and he was before me – and I was the first person to actually put it in writing and discuss it . . .
Monte: Wow.
Bruce: . . . yeah, I guess . . . I guess I did it. The only mistake I guess I ever did was I didn’t copyright it but . . .
Monte: [laughs]
Bruce: . . . there I was!
Monte: Yeah, yeah.
Bruce: But it makes perfect sense because that’s sort of what we do. We, we take websites that are not really written for search engines and we optimize it so that the search engine can understand what you’re about.
Monte: Right, right.
Bruce: Pretty straight forward. But, yeah, I’ve been doing it . . . I started out working out of my house, brought in my girlfriend, brought in her brother, brought in two more and had to move out of the house and now I’m 30 people with 10 open recs, business is good. [laughs] It’s grown quite a bit.
Monte: Now, your client base is typically very large based clients? Or do you work with small clients and large clients? What’s your sweet spot?
Bruce: Actually, I work all over the place. Most of my clients are in the $2 million to $5 million, so they’re not very large but they’re big enough to understand that the Web is really going to generate some long term revenue is they just pay attention to it. The larger clients I have are like Countrywide Home Loans and MPV and CMP Media and a bunch of just very, very large accounts; Edmunds being one of them. And then I have this woman in San Fernando Valley that sells witchcraft supplies out of her garage . . .
Monte: Right.
Bruce: . . . and that is probably, uh, way too small of a client normally. I just think every SEO has to have at least one witch as a client, just in case . . .
Monte: [laughs]
Bruce: . . . [laughs] but I’m all over the board. And really, what we like to do around here (and I guess it’s based on the personalities of the companies), we like to take people that really need us. You know, I think that if you don’t need us, I don’t want your money. And if you do need us, then can we win and is it a fight worth fighting and lets go win. And, so it isn’t so much of are you big or are you small . . .
Monte: It’s if you’re needed and can you apply what you know and your knowledge all the way back then to do a better job and make another company more successful and how to be an ROI, I assume.
Bruce: That’s it exactly. We spend a lot of energy on structuring our products so at the low end, we have tools for do-it-yourselfers and we can upgrade that into a full comprehensive training program that we teach and then we can upgrade that into consulting; we can do site assessments. We have small, jump-start kind of SEO programs for somebody just getting going. We have larger projects; we have projects up in the quarter million range. We have projects . . . you know, the tools are $145 a quarter if you get them all. So, we can cater to the do-it-yourselfers all the way up through the major corporations and we never break our stride doing it. It’s a pretty comprehensive, wide range of offerings. And basically we can do something for everybody.
Monte: Right, right. Now one of the people . . . one of the things that people struggle with is that obviously the industry and the way that search engines hit sites and the different rules and regulations and you know, just the different ways to get around what’s going on at people’s websites in terms of trying to trick the search engines and all that stuff – it continuously changes. It seems like it’s a never-ending process to make sure that you’re ranked well, that you’re following the new protocols, that you’re not stuck in the sandbox and all this stuff. I mean, how do you consult your clients on continuing to stay on top? I mean, do they have to stay engaged with you on a constant basis? Is it then kind of a . . . do you teach them how to do what you’ve been doing and then they kind of do it themselves and then use you periodically once they get going? Or is it an ongoing relationship?
Bruce: The correct answer to that question is “Yes.”
Monte: All of the above.
Bruce: All of the above. We actually have a program called our Jump Start where it is more of a “teach a man to fish” program than a “become dependent upon us” program. There’s a great many people that have been doing SEO that, you know, they can get in the Top 30, but they can’t . . . you know . . . they can’t crack the nut to get into the Top 10. All they really need is a little bit of help, a little bit of mentoring and some teaching and they can get past that. And so our program, which is only a 90 day program and is pretty inexpensive, allows people to be able to do that. There’s other people, of course, that don’t have any SEO knowledge. They almost can’t spell SEO and they basically need a turnkey solution. But we do have a program designed to help people just get over the rough spots and we do a lot of that. Some of my clients are SEOs.
Monte: Yeah, yeah; I realize that. And you’re very present, like we mentioned on the show opener, you’re at the media events, you’re at SES, you’re at WebmasterWorld, you’re at AdTECH. And so there’s a lot of different shows that you participate in. What conference is the best for people and why? Who should be going to what conference and why?
Bruce: Well, one of the things that I found is that the WebmasterWorld Conferences are very good; they’re tactical. There isn’t as much strategy involved. The average attendee is a smaller company. They grew out of a lot of affiliate type people that went to conferences. In the beginning, coming from WebmasterWorld, there were a great many tricks involved, so people were worried about tricks and black hat kind of stuff. But most of the show is white hat at this point: how do you really get traffic is really what it’s about. But it’s for a technical audience.
Monte: Can you explain the term “black hat – white hat” and “gray hat?” They’re used all the time. Give the definition to everybody about what each one is . . . a lot of people did black hat that are now white hat now because of just the way they changed their business but map out what a white hat is and what a black hat is and what somebody in the middle is.
Bruce: Okay. Uhm, black hat is commonly referred to as a career professional spammer. They employ all sorts of interesting tricks in order to get the search engines to rank their site better when otherwise the site hasn’t earned that right.
Monte: For instance . . . give us a couple techniques that one may use in the past that worked in the past but doesn’t work anymore.
Bruce: Well, the very easiest one to remember is stuffing a lot of keywords on your page, white text on a white background. In that particular case, the search engines would see the words, but a human would not be able to discern.
Monte: So it would be like an above the . . . you know, above or below all the rest of the content that you could read – its all kind of hidden in there?
Bruce: Yeah, and you’d scroll forever and it just looks like more white page and really, in fact, its got all sorts of stuff to keyword.
Monte: I see.
Bruce: Another example is even more currently used, layers and dibs and CSS’ and absolute positioning to position blocks of text in a space above the top of the screen where nobody can ever scroll to it, but a search engine would see the text. Or you position keywords behind an image, where a user would only see the image but the search engine would see the word. It’s an attempt to stuff words into what is perceived by the search engine to be the page and therefore, deceives the search engine into thinking that you’re site is about something its not. Broken plays, doorway pages; there’s a great many things . . . Google, fortunately, has a very nice page in their webmaster area about what not to do. And, I encourage everybody to read that. Just go to Google.com\webmasters and you’ll find all sorts of content. The white hat is a person that plays dead center inbounds. They don’t try to deceive at all. Our focus (and I consider myself white hat) . . . our focus is really to make the page itself the best it could be. And that . . . the saying I use is “it’s not the job of SEO to make a pig fly; it’s the job of SEO to genetically re-engineer it into an eagle.” You improve the content. And in general, the amount of energy that you would have put into spamming and deceiving and black hat tactics . . . that same amount of energy put into improving your content gives you better mileage and its longer lasting.
Monte: Right. ‘Cause it’s real and legitimate and genuine and has meaning and you know, you’re not really trying to hide anything.
Bruce: Right. And, what we find – and why optimization works – is the majority of the pages on the Internet can’t get out of their own way. They’re totally coloring outside of the lines, even by accident. To this day, I still see pages where the page title, on their home page, the page title says “Insert Title Here.” I mean, these are people that often make mistakes. Even if they get the titles right or this right or that right, they don’t get it all right.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: So, a big part of white hat is really just to understand where the opportunities are to say this is what I’m about without being spammy about it; and if you say it in all the right places, all the right times, and are above board and legitimate and on an average with what is natural for that keyword, then the search engines have a tendency to consider you to be worthy of ranking. Of course, beyond that is, are you worthy and an expert and there’s hundreds of variables involved. But white hat focuses on playing within bounds and making the search engine see your content as the subject matter expert and the best there is.
Monte: Right. And now I guess gray is somewhere in the middle where you’re using some of the other former techniques that worked in the past and hoping that they don’t blow up on you but also using some of the white hat techniques to marry it.
Bruce: Yeah. An example would be, according to Google, if you participate in link exchanges, reciprocal link programs or you buy advertising, things like that, sometimes you can get in trouble, because that’s not a testimonial grade link. And if you overdue, they can wipe you out.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: And that has happened in the past to a great many sites. It wasn’t too long ago, remember Google wiped out BMW because they were using No Script tags in their header to stuff keywords on their page. I believe that is what it was. And they fixed it in a matter of 72 hours or a little after they were back in the index but the fact is, a great many people color outside the lines.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: People in the gray hat area . . . have you . . . I think everybody understands how to play the game “Telephone?”
Monte: Yes.
Bruce: Where I tell you, you tell them, and they tell them and it goes around the room. And it goes all the way around the room, it gets to the beginning and it’s not the same as when it left.
Monte: Right. That’s gray hat.
Bruce: That’s gray hat. Because that’s the way a lot of people have actually over time learned how to do SEO. They . . . one person says something at a conference, another person posts it in the bog just slightly changed; three people read it; move it to forums; five people discuss it; a sixth person reads that and interprets it their own way; tells two of their friends and yada-yada. And all of a sudden, we’ve got webmasters out there that are, you know, when you say whatever you do, don’t deceive the search engines; by the time it comes all the way around, its saying “put white text on a white background.” I mean, it’s totally transformed in the process. By the way, that’s one of the reasons that people go to conferences is that everybody should hear the same thing one time. That usually works out pretty well.
Monte: Right, right. Anyway, getting back to the different conferences and why one should attend one – thank you by the way for that definition of each one because its used a lot, really; people that hear black hat, think of the devil sometimes and [laughs] and you know, things that work in the past don’t work today and I know its going to continue to evolve and then change and you know, some of the things I want to talk to you about, too, during the show tonight.
Bruce: Not a problem. The second conference is Search Engine Strategies. It is generally attended by people that are responsible for implementing marketing programs. And, I’ve been a . . . fortunately, I’ve been a speaker there since almost . . . I think the second show is when I started speaking, back when the entire advanced track had an attendance of, I think, 80 people; it was really small. And, today you go and each session has a room capable of holding 400 or 500; back then we were sitting at a 20-person round table, having our entire advance session. So things have changed a lot. And the audience there is technical but they are also responsible for marketing programs within their client-customer site environment. I’d say about half of the people in attendance are doing SEO work and the other half are corporations.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: Whereas, the WebmasterWorld, remember, there’s a great many people who are webmasters and SEOs but not major corporations generally.
Monte: Right, right.
Bruce: At the opposite end, we have AdTECH and I’ve got a booth at AdTECH, I speak at AdTECH and at AdTECH, what was absolutely mind-boggling, having attended WebmasterWorld and SES for years and years and years before I got into AdTECH, everybody knew what SEO was and everybody, you know, had an idea, you know, of who the players were in the industry, and it was an industry-type conference. When I went to AdTECH, probably 8 of 10 people had never heard of SEO or had the wrong idea. We had people coming up to our booth and saying, what is SEO? Which I never had seen before. These are people that buy into networks and they . . . they’re into Pay Per Click but not SEO and to them Internet marketing was just called Overture – that was Internet marketing; that’s all there was. And, they didn’t even know that you could do things to help the search engines understand what you’re about so you can be perceived as an expert. They didn’t even know you could do that. And so I’d say AdTECH is more your professional agency class, three levels up managers that sign contracts kind of thing. Now for an SEO firm, since I was in . . . especially in my booth, there weren’t a lot of SEO firms there. I found it to be a totally boggling experience. There weren’t a lot of people there even talking SEO. And, but it was certainly a good conference from the standpoint of the people that were there, that didn’t have a clue about SEO. They were the people that were really, seriously talking to you, because there’s weren’t a lot of other people around. It was just, you were there, these people were serious; and it was a great conference. But so different. At one end you have AdTECH, which is your advertising-agency-large-corporation-lots-of money-on-the-table kind of a conference; at the other end you WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Strategies is in the middle.
Monte: Is there any other conference that we should be aware of that’s up and coming? Or one that’s been around for awhile that folks in this space should be attending? Or looking to learn something from? Or is there other kinds of forms or areas that they could spend time on?
Bruce: It really depends on how you perceive the industry to move. For instance, Search Engine Strategies is going to be having one in Los Angeles on just video – a video conference.
Monte: So they get very niched and very targeted to difference areas of SEO, even?
Bruce: Right. So, I think that . . . certainly, MTV being one of my clients and Edmunds, I’m going to be very interested in that conference because we are doing video optimization and the only issue is the search engines haven’t decided what they want to be when they grow up when it comes to video, so things are somewhat volatile and subject to change without notice.
Monte: Right, right.
Bruce: Not too many people can get ranked for videos yet.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: But, yeah, niche . . . I think we’re going to see a lot of niche players out there.
Monte: A lot of niche.
Bruce: I think we’re going to see just drastic changes industry-wide.
Monte: And, I mean, what kind of drastic changes do you show because like I said (and you know this) it’s an every-evolving changing environment. The rules continue to change and of course Google keeps coming out with their new . . . some kind of new set of 100 or 120 criteria that they measure and to legitimize a website and its, you know, legitimacy before they go and rank it and everybody’s competing to be on the top of the first page, on the top 5 searches and all that stuff. What kind of things do you see coming down the pike that are going to change and how would you advise your clients . . . or how are you advising your clients to stay in touch with that?
Bruce: Well, I have this different view of search. See, I grew up in the mainframe world and while its arguable whether mainframes or networked PCs are the way of the future, growing up in the mainframe world you have a perspective basically big iron, lots of myths of power and you know, millions of dollars going into that. Then along came the PC and now everybody has a PC. I mean, I don’t have a mainframe but I’ve got lots of PCs. What I see happening in search (in my opinion), we’re going to see the main search engines, the Googles, the Yahoo!s become like mainframe searches. They’re going to be big-bread-n’-butter-generic-worldwide-give-me-all-the-information-that-you’ve-got-types of search engines. Then I see what the equivalent of a PC to be would actually be your mobile devices – the people . . . where’s my local pizza place; how do I do this on local search; hi, I’m in the middle of nowhere, I broke my tooth – where do I find a 24-hour dentist.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: Searches like that are going to become more commonplace: where’s an ATM machine. I mean, questions we all ask ourselves: I have to find a bank; where’s a post office; I’m out at . . . you know . . . where do I do this. And while we’re finding GPS are getting better, smarter, wiser, my opinion is that search is going to become a big player at the local level. Bigger than it has so far. And its going to come in devices we’d hadn’t even thought of having search on. And while I certainly think that the main search engines and the people who sell product globally are always going to be players in the Googles and Yahoo!s, I think that there’s a niche opening – a horizontal layer below the main search engines, much like a true local or a product like that, where they are really targeting the local search marketplace, people that need answers on a local level. And I see that as being a big, big product area coming in the future.
Monte: Right. One thing that might be even relevant – I don’t know if you’ve been brought up to speed on the new .MOBI application, the new .MOBI domain name? But obviously there’s a big . . . there’s always been a big shift over the recent, you know, 18 months to getting more and more onto mobile devices and coming up with ways to be more mobile and that kind of stuff, I believe that you’re right in step with that, too, as well.
Bruce: Yes. And I have friends at Nokia, as an example. Nokia is, uh, they’re doing tens and tens of billions of dollars a year in sales of their phone products; and this must have been a-year-and-a-half, almost two years ago – they were shipping over 4 million Web-enabled phones a month. Two years ago.
Monte: Wow. Wow.
Bruce: I mean, this is . . . this is a lot of paper . . . people out there that have access to web sites. Now I’m finding a great many emails, that I send emails, I’m getting answers back from mobile devices, not desktop machines. I think its going to become quite common; you’ll find people doing, even PC work, on a mobile.
Monte: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m using my Trio for all kinds of stuff that I never thought I’d ever use.
Bruce: Yeah.
Monte: But that’s the way it is. Now, you were one of the early firms offering a private certification for your web . . . your SEO, you know, tool set . . .
Bruce: Yeah.
Monte: Where might this lead in the future and are there people interested in training and certification?
Bruce: Yes. There’s a great many people interested in that. We’ve been teaching classes now for over three years. They’re offered generally here at my facility in Southern California, although I do classes at customer sites for larger audiences. And I’ve been full. I mean, every class is full. I don’t have a problem. They fill up. Usually, even a week or so in advance. It’s not Twelfth hour; I’m already half booked, even, for August and I haven’t even done the class on the 17th of this month yet. People are really . . .
Monte: Now, is the class for SEOs?
Bruce: Pardon?
Monte: Is the class for SEOs? Or is it for business owners? Is it for . . .? Who’s the audience?
Bruce: It actually is about a third of the class is SEOs; most of the class are business owners. It's for people who . . . even if you’re going to go out and hire an SEO, everyone of the people who are our clients, we have them go through our course . . .
Monte: Oh, that’s good.
Bruce: . . . because one of the things that makes a very powerful team – and you can’t avoid it – a powerful team in SEO is when the client and the vendors speak the same language and SEO is a technical language. We need our clients to understand why things have to be done in a certain way. We constantly (used to, at least) before we obligated our clients to take the course, we’d find we’d send somebody an update to a page and it’d have, say 10 edits on the page. And what would happen is the marketing department would read it and say, that looks good by me; and send it to their webmaster team, who would put in 8 of our 10 changes and “improve” the rest – which is another way of saying they’re going to spam.
Monte: [laughs]
Bruce: And, we’re constantly – we were constantly fighting that kind of a battle. And without somebody in the customer environment representing us, we were always losing. We would get a great many changes. We would over time get rankings but it would take longer than it should have. And so, what we found is by having our clients take the course and people who are do-it-yourselfers take the course and even SEOs take the course. They’re able to learn what . . . they’re not playing telephone anymore. They’re able to learn what’s going on; they’re more supportive of the project; they are better clients, even, because they get it. And I don’t know how many people out there wouldn’t, almost, pay a fortune to have a client that gets it. So many don’t.
Monte: Now, what is the cost . . obviously, there’s a cost of attending the course and when is your next session?
Bruce: Well, my next session is July 17th , 18th, 19th, followed by on the 20th of an advanced session. Its here in Simi Valley, which is in Southern California. If they go to SEOtoolset.com, they can find information about how to sign up and you get agenda and all this kind of stuff. The standard course is a 2 ½ day course, with lunch provided – y9ou know, standard stuff. And that is $1495, which is pretty cheap. When you take the course, you get access to the SEO Toolset for a year for a domain and its enough for you to really do some damage, I guess, to your competition. Certainly, it comes with live body tech support, the whole nine years. I mean, it’s a comprehensive course designed really to teach people, especially at the do-it-yourself level, how to play with power tools and win. That’s the same set of tools that we use here. And all my own staff are world-trained on that. Generally, I make my own staff take this course at least every six months. Usually we have three to five people in every class from my own company.
Monte: Oh, that’s nice. So, you’re continuing education and making sure that they’re learning what you’re teaching your clients, obviously.
Bruce: Obviously but as you pointed out earlier, the search engines are constantly changing, so between sessions that I have just within my own company, then having them go through the training course, I think we’re pretty well covered on how to do SEO.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: The other advantage I have, of course, with my own staff is we do all the conferences and I usually take somewhere between six and eight people, so they can see what’s going on. But our courses are very well received. They’ve been getting very high reviews and many times I’ll have people come take the course, I’ve had SEOs come take the course and then send me an email six weeks after the course saying, I wasn’t sure it was going to work, I thought I’d try it – my mother thanks you for a new house.
Monte: [laughs]
Bruce: those sorts of things. And those are really, really powerful things, although nobody would believe it if you read but I’m actually receiving emails like that. And, its really a fantastic course, it truly is. And I encourage everybody to take it or at least take a course where you get to actually sit there and ask questions as the course goes on.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: I mean, you . . . its one thing to take an online course and then at the end you get to ask questions – but we . . . this is an interactive kind of a course. Out of 2 ½ days, I probably spend 25% - 30% of the course just answering questions from the audience, as it goes – stream of consciousness, lets get everything exposed and get an answer. And is works out real well in that respect.
Monte: Right, right. Hey, Bruce, let’s uh . . . we’re going to take a break but when we come back I want to learn more about what’s called “soiling,” that you mentioned in your course a lot . . .
Bruce: Right.
Monte: And then talk a little bit about the IP funnel and some of the techniques, you know, that some of the people are using for domain names right now.
Bruce: Sounds great.
Monte: Okay. So, hang on, we’re going to take a commercial break and be right back on with Bruce Clay.
[Commercials]
Monte: Hello, welcome back to Domain Masters. And welcome back to my guest, Bruce Clay from BruceClay.com. Now, Bruce, we were talking about the great idea that people should go attend your SEO course that you hold at your offices, and one of the things that you talk about in your course is a technique that you invented called “soiling.” Can you explain what that is and what impact you’ve seen in traffic?
Bruce: Well, what we’ve done is (and its been called a great many things) its really siloing . . .
Monte: Oh, sorry; I thought it was soiling; siloing, that’s what I mean.
Bruce: Yeah, I know; I’ve seen typed about 5 different ways in the forum so far. There’s a lot of communication about it. What it is, is a way of having really multiple themes intermixed onto a single website. So what you have is a website and it talks about several topics. It could talk about . . . I don’t know, soap. And you have laundry soap and dish soap and body soap and theoretically, if you mix all those on one website, and you do it correctly, you will be well ranked for dish soap – all three of them, in fact. If you do it incorrectly . . . .
Monte: [inaudible] you’re using all the valid content and words and key words around all the forms of soap, so you really you do a better of job of ranking of one or the other.
Bruce: Right. And what we can actually do is get you to rank in multiples. The best we’ve done is 48 different themes within one physical domain.
Monte: Oh, wow.
Bruce: The problem is its very hard to do. The problem has more to do with how do you delineate the theme into basically one pocket, one part of your website. As opposed to bleeding the themes all together. The example I commonly use is let’s suppose you have a jar of white marbles; and that’s your website, okay? It’s white marbles. You can pretty easily convince a search engine you’re about white marbles. Now you mix in an equal number of black marbles; you might still be able to convince the search engine you’re about white marbles – maybe. You mix in another 200 colors; white marbles isn’t really what you’re about anymore. You might be about marbles, but you’re not necessarily about white marbles. What we want to be able to do is to have you recognize, architecturally recognize as being about marbles and white marbles and blue marbles and black marbles and green marbles and red marbles and etc.
Monte: Right, right.
Bruce: We want you to be recognized as a subject matter expert in each of those themes concurrently within the same domain, in a way that’s going to allow you to rank very, very well and that’s what we have to work on. We’re working on how do I architecturally get the search engine to see that these are not being all bled together. That its just not a bunch of glass things that are white marbles and that’s siloing.
Monte: Now, that sounds like a challenge for things that are related, like using the marble example of white vs. red vs. blue or you know, big marbles, small marbles. What if it’s a website like mine, where we’re offering various domain registrar services and aftermarket services but they’re all related but they’re different topics all on the same page? That’s kind of some of the things we struggle with, so I’m an ICANN accredited registrar but I’m also a domain sales and aftermarket service company with escrow services; we’re also, you know, into some web hosting and some other things. What’s the challenge of something like that to try to get you ranked on all these different things when you have all these different messages going on, on one website?
Bruce: It’s the same problem that most stores have. Or, lets take cars. You want to rank well for Ford 150 but you have 41 other makes on your website.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: I mean, they’re going to detract from individual makes. You know, you may be at the top for cars, but you may not rank very well for Ford 150, Custom 4X4.
Monte: Or another example might be Ford, you know, car sales, versus their service center versus their parts division; that’s kind of more of the example, I guess.
Bruce: Right. And using that as an example, its still how to use structure and content on your site, so that when a search engine comes and says, okay, I’ve got this page and it goes down into fifty pages of content that only talk about web hosting – doesn’t talk about submission, doesn’t talk about SEO, it talks about web hosting – that’s a web hosting site. Right?
Monte: Right.
Bruce: It’s easily seen. All these steps of content is strictly and focused on the concept of web hosting. This other area over here is focused strictly on registration, and those are different. What happens in most cases is every page in your registration area links over to your hosting area; and every page on hosting links over to registration . . .
Monte: Right. You want to try to cross sales and give other opportunities to one site versus the other, right? And then [inaudible] one product offering versus another, so that can actually hurt you in some ways because of that, right?
Bruce: Absolutely. Absolutely. What I did was, as you may know, in March of this year I put up a brand new BruceClay.com website. And having been in #3 position for search engine optimization, replacing the whole website, for about 72 hours I was holding my breath. Because, lets face it – that’s a pretty important phrase for me.
Monte: I’m on your site – you did your site Flash, right?
Bruce: The top navigation is in Flash; I think Flash can be done correctly on any site.
Monte: Well, you’ve obviously proven that.
Bruce: Yeah. I’ve actually gone from #3 to #2 in Google for search engine optimization. The thing that was so great about it is I’ve added a lot of content, so, I mean, if you type in “PPC Management,” – certainly on search engine optimization, I’m #2 – you type in “PPC Management,” I’m up there. You type in SEO Design, I’m first page. I mean, I’m probably first page for 200 terms and the reason I’m ranking so well on all those terms is I really applied siloing to my site. The only thing I really did was at the beginning of March, I put up a new site that was totally siloed; it was W3C compliant – every page; I went through every page to make sure it was compliant, transitional. I made sure that I had additional content. I’ve increased the content on my website; for all these new silos, the content has increased five fold, maybe six or seven. I keep adding content.
Monte: Well, you had a pretty content rich site before this, too.
Bruce: Oh, I had a phenomenally content-rich site, compared to most. And my content is not sitting there in, you know, forums. I mean, I have a lot of real content on my site. I tell you all sorts of things about analytics and about email and branding and Pay Per Click and methodology and do this, do this, do this and then you’ll win. And all that content I’m giving away. And as much as I can give away, you see nothing until you’ve taken our course. But I give away all the content and what I have found is that when I went to my siloed approach, the number of unique visitors (not the number of pages visited, but the number of unique visitors to my site – which means, search engines, basically) jumped 40% in 72 hours. And that is a significant jump. The number of people filling out the inquiry form for some of my services from my website more than doubled.
Monte: Wow.
Bruce: And so, what I attribute that to is that search engines spidered the site and I started picking up all sorts of long-tail key words, new key words; I actually am better ranked for search engine optimization and it’s a very clean site from the standpoint that you get into SEO, its only about SEO. You get into Pay Per Click, its only about Pay Per Click. Pay Per Click doesn’t link to SEO or vice-versus except just for landing pages. I only link to landing pages. I don’t link to arbitrary content pages. And by doing it correctly, I consider myself to have not only NOT gone down in the rankings but I’ve gone up. And . . .
Monte: Well, the one thing that you can stand behind, Bruce, that a lot of SEOs can’t (and I’m not criticizing, you know, a lot of SEO companies – there’s a lot of great firms out there) but you can actually say, the proof is in the pudding and look at my own results. And that’s hard for some other firms to state, because they’re not ranked in the top 3 or 4 but they claim to be the best at SEO. And some of the first things you ask is, if you’re the best, how come you’re not ranked in the top page, you know, at the top of the first page in your own field.
Bruce: Well, I even had the opposite. I was well ranked, Top 3, Top 4, Top 2, you know, it fluctuates. I was well ranked for search engine optimization and my competition started saying to mutual prospects – yeah, but he got ranked by mistake and he hasn’t changed his site in, you know, three-four years. So I had to replace my whole site almost in self defense and when I did, the rankings went up.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: Because I . . .
Monte: Now, that’s a big myth about what happens when one changes their website from one version to the next. I’ve heard all kinds of rumors and all kinds of scary . . . scare tactics that, you know, you’re going to get unranked by Google, your page ranks going to be lost, all these things are going to happen. I mean, obviously, you did a hell of a lot of research and had some foresight in terms of what you needed to do, especially not only changing the whole website layout that you had previously but even going to a Flash navigation panel and you know, testing the waters in areas that people used to say was a big no-no for SEO.
Bruce: [inaudible]
Monte: How did you get through all that and remain . . . ? did you ever see a dip down in rank before they went back up? Is that a big myth? Or . . .? How’s it work with Google and Yahoo! and those guys?
Bruce: I think that where you’re changing your content significantly, there’s an opportunity to make mistakes. You might have a page that’s very well optimized for some key words – and you don’t even know this page ranks for those key words, necessarily; they’re long tail keywords – and when you rewrite it, you take out words, or you use different words or you rephrase things. And what happens is websites usually shoot themselves in the foot because they don’t pay attention to not changing things that aren’t broken. They just go through and change everything and they rename the pages and they don’t pay attention to forwarding the old URLs to the new ones and they get 404 errors or they have typographical errors in their content or they just change so many things at one time without planning, that, you know, they take a hit. And then they have to fight their way back up. In our particular case, as you pointed out, I mean, we put in a lot of thought before we went live with the new site. And, I made sure that everything was the way it was supposed to be. And when that site went live, I had no dip at all, anywhere. Not a thing went down. Everything either stayed the same or went up. And, I consider that to be, you know, the way it should be; not an anomaly. Certainly, in a phrase as competitive as search engine optimization, if I would have done it wrong, I wouldn’t be on the first page. It would have cost me.
Monte: Right, right.
Bruce: And, so I had no choice but to pay attention to every little detail. You know, you periodically see these things that say all you need is content or all you need is links or you know, keyword density doesn’t count and you know, all these things that you read in the forums about, you know, you don’t need to pay attention to the little stuff, just write good stuff. Well, they’re right. But if you write good stuff and pay attention to the little things, that’s the difference between being #20 and #1.
Monte: [inaudible] Right. It could make a material impact on what your results are then.
Bruce: Yeah, absolutely. Think about the following: a hundred million results, okay? There’s a hundred million results for a query – that’s a lot. You’ve got to think out of a hundred million, one out of a million is tied for number one with the rest. So there’s a hundred of them tied for number one out of a hundred million. That’s only one out of a million tied for number one. What makes the difference between you being number one and you being number 100? And it’s the little things.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: You pay attention to the little things. People constantly come to us and they have, you do a query and their phrase is, you know, fifty million results. And they’re complaining because they’re on page 3. Well, of course you’re on page 3, because you haven’t paid attention to the little things. At which time they always say, well, tell me about the little things. Well, you know, those are efforts. The 80-20 rule. You get 80% of your results with 20% of the effort; the remaining 20% of the result takes the remaining 80% of the effort.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: And that 80% of the effort is paying attention to the little things. If you’re . . .
Monte: Right. If you’re [inaudible] phrase is ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff;” if you really want to compete in a very competitive space, such as search engine optimization or in the case of my case, Domain Registration or another thing, you do got to sweat the small stuff then.
Bruce: You have to sweat the small stuff. And that’s where siloing plays, that’s where all of the different things that might be the hundreds of variables in the algorithm, all of them play. You have to pay attention to those things. And, if you’re only going to pay attention to a few of them, don’t expect to be #1.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: Or, if you are #1, it’s a fluke, you know; what’s the thing . . .?
Monte: Right; it won’t last.
Bruce: . . . even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes. You know. I mean, sometimes pages get ranked and its just, you know, a fluke. But don’t expect it to hold over time and if you change the page at all, expect to have a radical shift. So, I mean, its kind of hard. We’re working diligently not because we are the keepers of the secret recipe over at Google. I mean, nobody has that, except the Google – I’m not even sure that one guy at Google has that. But, whatever it is, we play fair, we play inbounds and we pay attention to the little thing.
Monte: Right.
Bruce: And if you do that enough, you’re going to beat the guys that don’t. That’s it.
Monte: Hey, uhm, just real quick before we move on to the IT Funnel and the domain stuff. Obviously, we talk a lot about Google and of course there’s Yahoo! and then now there’s Microsoft stepping into the space and at the last SES we heard about Ask. How is Microsoft and Ask gonna . . . is it going to change the way that you guys do things as an SEO firm? Is it important to be ranked on those sites as much as it is on Google and Yahoo!? How are you weighting the importance of all the different engines now, now that there’s four, you know? Maybe soon to be more. And, you know, the time you spend. Google is the big powerhouse and the one everybody’s picked as the most important but really some of these others are important as well, right?
Bruce: Yes, they all are important and in my view, you can not disregard Ask. Ask is making a lot of headway and they have some really cool feature and I like Ask. They . . . Ask doesn’t, by the way, like SEOs at all. But, Ask is a . . . going to be an issue. MSN obviously is an issue. They have the patience . . . I mean, look what happened with Internet Explorer versus Netscape. They were just more patient than anybody in the world and they just slowly overcame that and now they’re ninety-something percent market share. I think MSN is assuming, or Microsoft, is assuming that MSN is going to do the same thing for search. They are certainly trying to have a serious impact in the Pay Per Click space; I think that’s where the money is. I think once they solve the money problem, they’re going to put more money elsewhere. And MSN will be a player. I think if anybody out there is at risk right now, I think Google . . . both Google and Yahoo! are paying a lot of attention to MSN. The risk is MSN suddenly becoming popular. They have the money, they have the name, the have the same power. They have programming coming out of their ears. They can do whatever they want. I think everybody’s paying attention to them. Do I think that Google’s ever going to go away – no. Do I think Yahoo! is going to go away – ah, Yahoo! is probably more at risk than MSN going away. And Ask is just trying to be the next Google. I think that they’re coming up with features that people are going to like and they’re going to tell two friends, and they’re going to tell two friends . . . and before you know it, coming out of nowhere is going to be Ask.
Monte: Right, right. And so really, the prediction is there’s going to be four major players here and some might be shrinking their market share. Yahoo! is already is already really kind of trying to reposition themselves, anyway, as more of . . . more of a, you know, online entertainment vehicle, kind of. The way they’ve been aligning themselves with some of the entertainment companies and radio and TV and stuff and maybe isn’t the best place to go in the future for search anyway.
Bruce: We don’t really know that. I think video is going to be a big player. There’s going to be a lot of advertising in that space, so maybe they want to do that. I think we have to pay attention to the fact that Time Warner is still a player. They own AOL and Netscape . . .
Monte: Right.
Bruce: And so they’re still able to be a player. And one of the dark horse guys out there that nobody ever really pays much attention to is this little company called IBM, which probably has more technology than all the rest put together. Just it happens to be tied up in ten year, you know, they sell to government. You know, they have contracts with people for search and they never bothered to develop an open search type engine like a Google or a Yahoo! or an MSN. But if all of a sudden, IBM were to wake up and say, you know, we’ve got all these patents and all this technology – why don’t we really release our own product. I’d say they could be a big player overnight. They’ve got more money than all the rest.
Monte: Oh, yeah. They can put their foot down and all of a sudden, be a force to be reckoned with just because of their name.
Bruce: Yeah; and I don’t think that anybody here has paid attention to the fact that the other shoe may not have fallen at all. There’s big technology companies out there that can play.
Monte: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Well, lets talk a little bit before we wind up the show – the IP Funnel and domain mapping. We’ve touched briefly on some of those topics at the WebmasterWorld Conference when I had you on the show back then but what’s evolved in the techniques of the IP Funnel and I know you discuss some things on your site – but what’s really going on with how dot domains are mapped and some of the domain strategies regarding SEO?
Bruce: Well, one of the things that we have found over time is that the search engines are really spending more time filtering results. I think we’ve all done a query, for instance, in Google and at the bottom of the page in blue letters, if says, uhm, “certain results have been omitted; click here to see them all?”
Monte: Yeah.
Bruce: Where you click and all of sudden you now have many more pages of results. That’s referred to as filtering and you actually find that some of the pages that they have suppressed were suppressed because they were perceived to be duplicate content with the pages they rendered. That’s a big issue. So, when you study the IP area and look at how does content get actually spidered, sometimes what we found is if you’re doing a mapping through DNS as an example, where you go to any of these domains, you end up on the same physical site – what we were finding is that those physical pages were being indexed under those other domain names. So if I have 5 pages, I have domain dot com and domain dot net and domain dot org and I map them through DNS all to the same physical site, the home page for domain dot com was being duplicate content for domain dot net and duplicate content for domain dot org, because all of these sites pointed to the same physical site. So when you spider them, they all showed up. That in and of itself would result in a general dilution of your content being yours [inaudible] . . .
Monte: [inaudible] three or four other domains that share even though it was you redirecting it to your own site.
Bruce: Yes. We have one site that had 38 of them and what we found is, based upon which one was spidered the last site to be spidered, the home page would actually be attributed and other sub pages would be attributed randomly to one of those 38 domains. Whichever one was last would be picked up. And it has to do with authority . . .
Monte: Instead of the main site . . . instead of the main site.
Bruce: Correct. It has to do with authority. And many times we see sites that publish articles and also syndicate it, where they publish the article, they put it up on their own site, they put it into syndication and The Wall Street Journal will pick up that ad, uh, that article and for that very same article that this site wrote, they don’t show up but the The Wall Street Journal will because they’re a bigger authority.
Monte: I see.
Bruce: In that case, that’s where authority plays. So if you own a bunch of domains of your own, the last thing you want to do is compete with yourself at an authority level. You want your content to be unique to one domain. So what I did (it was awhile back), we invented something called the IP Funnel. Its actually described on our site in our server technical tips area; you can find it in the footer of BruceClay.com. There’s a link right to server technical tips. The IP Funnel really is a way of taking all of your parked domains and using a 301 through one of them, you can really funnel all of them over to your production domain, eliminating all this duplicate content problem. It just goes away. Came out with it a couple years back. The thing that is unique about it is that also by definition, removes the issue of authority. You can not get confused over which site is the authority because the 301, not that 301’s work the way they’re supposed to (remember, we had the 301, 302 got confused there a year ago) . . .
Monte: Right.
Bruce: The 301 actually allows the authority to be specified for the dominant site; and that’s major increase in ranking because its unique content, its one site, its yours, nobody else is replicating it, they’re all 301ing to it and you end up being, basically, much more credible as a result. And, credibility is a big part of being MI subject matter expert or not. And that’s one of the things the IP Funnel fixes. It removes the filtering. It removes the problems with duplicate content form multiple domains that are parked or DNS forwarded to the same physical disk space. Solves that problem entirely. A great solution for that.
Monte: Oh, great.
Bruce: The thing is . . . the thing that seems to be the case, though, is when we have people come to us, prospects that come to us and ask us about why am I not ranked? I’d say probably 75% - 80% of all the clients that come to us are doing this kind of DNS mapping or just having it map to the same physical space. Or they’re doing 302s from other sites, which is equally as bad. They really end up hijacking their own rankings. Not because they meant to but because they didn’t know any better. The IP Funnel’s a great solution on anybody that owns multiple domains where you want . . . you type in Domain A, you want them to land on Domain B; that’s what the IP Funnel’s for.
Monte: That’s great. Well, that’s a great feature. And where on your website is this located? Because I want to put it up on the chat room.
Bruce: If you go to my home page, in the footer of our site, on BruceClay.com, there’s a link call “Server Technical Tips;” it goes to BruceClay.com\SEOtechtips\techtips.htm. You can’t miss it. It s a UNIX server so it is capital/lower case specific. Most people link to it. It’s pretty well defined. And one of the first entries on that page talks about the IP Funnel. We also talk about 404 pages and how to do . . . how to recover from all sorts of stuff. There’s lots of information on that page. But they’re technical tips and this is the kind of stuff that we kind of give away here. And, its part of the site.
Monte: Well, Bruce, its been great having you on and a lot of things that you went over tonight are going to be really valuable to those that are listening and podcasting the show. You guys are advertising Webmaster Radio as well and are you participating in any of the radio shows here?
Bruce: Am I advertising on any of them?
Monte: No, no. Are you participating in any of the radio show?
Bruce: Not yet. I’m thinking about actually coming up with one – I’ve been talking to Daren about it for awhile. Just, you know, my schedule is unbelievable.
Monte: Yeah, I know. I know how it is. [laughs]. Definitely know how it is on the schedule side.
Bruce: It would be wonderful if I felt like I was in control of my own schedule, sometimes.
Monte: Well, I’ll tell you what – I’ll put you on anytime you want, so we could talk about everything you want to talk about to help domainers and webmasters and SEOs out and that way its all on Domain Masters.
Bruce: That’s it. And that’s not a problem. And quite frankly, I’m here. I believe in helping everybody. I would not be in the position I’m in if people didn’t really benefit from what I do and what the industry does. I mean, I owe a lot to everybody, all my colleagues and customers and you know, I’m here to contribute back to the industry, so anytime I can talk and help and give away free information, I’m all over it.
Monte: Yeah, definitely. And everybody does appreciate that and I’m really glad I had you on because its clear why you are the inventor of the use of SEO as the term, because you’re like one of the grandfathers of . . . not to say that you’re as old as a grandfather but you’re definitely one of the first ones if not the first one to actually start doing this stuff. So, its always a pleasure and a privilege to have an expert on that can really decipher really what people can really do to make an impact. And your analogy to the 80-20 rule and then really going after the small stuff to get you into the key positions and the advantages is really, you know, really makes sense, because, you know, there’s so many firms out there that do all the stuff that everybody else does but a few companies just differentiate themselves as experts as being able to really, you know, provide an impact and a solution, that one can see from the results. And of course, once you do all the SEO work, the next key thing or the next important thing is to convert the customers to your site. That’s a whole ‘nother topic that we want to help customers with as well.
Bruce: Definitely. Absolutely.
Monte: So, Bruce, I guess we’ll see you at SES. Are you going to head down . . .? Are you going to be at SES Miami at all?
Bruce: I’m not going to be in Miami. As you know, I’m going to do training in Cape Town; then I’m doing my own training course; then I’m speaking at AdTECH Chicago; then I’m back for a week and then I do SES; then I do training in New York for a client; then I do my own training class and then I think I’m going to be doing training in San Francisco – that takes me to the end of August and its very uncommon not to have any time in that many weeks but . . .
Monte: Right; so, I guess, we’ll see you at SES and just in case you didn’t know, Danny finally put on the schedule a domain forum for domain names and so domain names are now a topic at SES and there’s going to be a whole session and panel about it, so . . .
Bruce: Cool!
Monte: So we’re going to be speaking on the panel there and so its coming to the forefront at SES; it was at WebmasterWorld, as you know, as a forum item. And as a panel topic now for going on two years, so, I think we’ll see it on SES . . . on the SES Platform and panels from now on as well.
Bruce: Sounds great.
Monte: Alright, Bruce, well, thanks a lot for your time and really wish you the best of luck and safe travels.
Bruce: Thanks; you, too.
Monte: Okay, take care . . .
Bruce: Bye-bye.
Monte: See you in San Jose.
Bruce: Yes.
Monte: [laughs] Alright, well, again, my special thanks to Bruce Clay. I think a lot of the points pointed out tonight were really invaluable so those of you that are going to be podcasting this are going to get a lot out of this radio show, that’s for sure. And we went, what? An hour and eighteen minutes, an hour and ten minutes. All full of really good content, good things that can really help you out, good tips and pointers and my thanks to the folks at Webmaster Radio for hanging on an extra 18 minutes. Glad we had a great show.
Next week, we’ll be doing recaps of both SES Miami and AdTECH and have some folks on from probably one or both of those places. Some of the companies that really make a difference and impact the way that people are going to be successful on the Web. And so stay tuned for next week on Wednesday and we’ll have another live show of Domain Masters. So, join me then and be the master of your domain. Take care.
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