Top Ten FREE SEO Tools for Register Here

Evaluating BruceClay / Bruce Clay SEO Training Speaker and Tools: SEO Blog Post

Bruce Clay is one of the most prominent SEO experts and trainers, worldwide. What's more, he is independent of Google, and therefore a more objective voice about search engine optimization. Bruce speaks at many nationwide SEO conferences like SES (Search Engine Strategies), SMX (Search Marketing Expo), and many others. He teaches SEO classes and courses, has written many SEO books, and offers SEO consulting services. But... Does he practice what he preaches? How does his website compare to SEO best practices? This blog post explores the Bruce Clay phenomenon and gives some recommendations on choosing an instructor for SEO Training.

By Jason McDonald Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group. Posted: July 11, 2010

Contents:

Bruce Clay - SEO Training Phenomenon
SEO Training - Online, Real World, or At a Show?
Analysis of Bruce Clay's Website for SEO

Bruce Clay - SEO Training Phenomenon

Bruce Clay is perhaps the most visible, non-Google guru on SEO. One of his most famous posts is his SEO Code of Ethics, which attempts to lay out the duty of all SEO web practitioners to honestly represent their capabilities, SEO, and to act in the best interests of their clients. His site (of course it is at BruceClay.com) has many free SEO tools, although all of them in our humble opinion are inferior to those we publish in our SEO Tools Workbook.

Beyond consulting and speaking, Bruce Clay has published one of the landmark books on SEO, Search Engine Optimization - All in One for Dummies. The website and person clearly have made a major contribution to advancing the art of teaching SEO to a broad audience. That said, however, there are numerous troublesome aspects of the Bruce Clay SEO Training phenomenon.

For example, his website reflects an approach to SEO of -

• Technology first, marketing second (if at all) - the site, and Bruce's presentations are very techie centric, and focus on SEO as a technical problem. SEO is in fact first and foremost a marketing problem. SEO should be a subset of your marketing goals, and should be perceived first and foremost as a marketing issue.
• Website first, marketing second (if at all) - similarly, the website is full of heavy text and poorly designed visuals. It isn't really well designed for explaining SEO, nor for providing an easy-to-use user experience. Bruceclay.com reflects the first generation of Websites, and hasn't really evolved over time.
• Not practicing what you preach - by this we mean that the website doesn't really engage the Internet. Ironically, a person who believes in SEO offers almost all of his training and material in person and at trade shows, as if the Internet were not really an appropriate medium by which to teach people Internet Marketing.

So while Bruce Clay is an important figure in the SEO industry, his approach suffers from an old school philosophy of an industry dominated by techies and by real-world trade shows that advocate using the Internet for your own marketing, while actually practicing a methodology of not using the Internet for anything other than attracting clients.

SEO Training - Online, Real World, or At a Show?

One of the very best things that Bruce Clay does, as compared with most SEO consultants or companies, is he teaches SEO. Rather than doing it for you, he teaches you how to do it yourself. The old adage about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him how to fish comes to mind, and Bruce Clay is to be complimented for teaching SEO.

A more nuanced question, however, is what is the most cost effective way to be taught SEO? Bruce Clay teaches primarily at individual events or at the major shows like Search Engine Strategies. Our complaint here would be that he is advocating, on the one hand, that you reach out to the Internet for your marketing strategy, but, on the other hand, he chooses to teach not on the Internet but at face-to-face shows and events, or paper books. This is a huge contradiction.

Moreover, it is not just a philosophical contradiction. It is a monetary and efficiency contradiction as well. Bruce Clay training costs, as of July 2010, are - Course fees are a 3-day Standard Course at $1,795 per student, and a 1.5-day Advanced Certification Course at $1,195. There are also 1-day abbreviated courses available through the major conferences for around $1,250. (Source: http://www.bruceclay.com/rates.htm). But beyond the up front costs, you must usually travel to a trade show or a major city, stay in a hotel, and pay all the substantial incidental costs. You must be available and willing at that particular time, as well. (SEO Training from the JM Internet Group, in contrast, starts at $295).

Real-world training is great, but for most people it is far, far more cost effective to take SEO online!

Analysis of Bruce Clay's Website for SEO

When selecting an SEO Training company, it stands to reason that you can use their website as a means to evaluate their SEO prowess. Bruce Clay stands head and shoulders over many websites (including our own) on one key factor: inbound links. This is the benefit of being older, and having had early initial success at SEO. He enjoys many great inbound links.

But beyond that, the structure and organization of the Bruce Clay Website (bruceclay.com) violate many of the most basic best practices of SEO. For example, take a look at his home page TITLE tag - <TITLE>BruceClay - Internet Marketing: Search Engine Optimization SEO Services, PPC, SMO, Design and Tools</TITLE>. As Bruce Clay, certainly knows, the home page TITLE tag is the most powerful tag of any website, yet his doesn't even have the term SEO Training in it! For someone focusing on SEO training, this is odd to say the least. The home page also has a plethora of H1 tags, without the 'double nesting' of H1 / H2 tags that is commonly preferred. Moreover, it has no H2 or H3 tags, despite what Google's own SEO document says about the proper use of the header family.

Beyond the home page, most pages on the site do not exhibit proper use of the H1 / H2 families. This is not the only thing in SEO, of course, but it is a common sense marker for one's on page SEO expertise. It is curious, to say the least, that one of the industry's most famous SEO guru's doesn't follow Google's own SEO guidelines about this important tag family. Throughout the site, the cosmetics of tags seem to have more influence than the actual relationship of on page SEO tags to SEO objectives. Finally, it is not clear on many pages just what the target SEO keyword / keyphrases are. A well designed, SEO friendly website should clearly convey its marketing mission starting with the home page TITLE tag. BruceClay.com simply does not.

In choosing an SEO company for your SEO training, you should be able to browse their website and get a crystal clear perspective on what that company offers, and represents. Start with the home page TITLE tag. If that isn't clear, you may be in trouble. Perplexingly, that is the case with the BruceClay / Bruce Clay home page.