Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

In a very informative article by Paul J. Bruemmer, founder of trademarkSEO he covers a panel discussion help at SES San Jose on SEO tools. The panel, hosted by Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch, included such notable speakers as Paul Bruemmer, Jim Boykin and Todd Malicoat of We Build Pages , Ken Jurina of Epiar and Bill Hartzer of Intec.

The article, located on the ISEDB website, outlines and provides links to a number useful SEO tools. From PageRank history analysis tools to keyword density and inbound link analysis there's much to be found in thei well-written document.

While some very useful tools such as PR Prowler, Total Optimizer Pro and a number of others are notably absent they have included many of the key tools that SEO's use every day.

You can read the article in full on the ISEDB website at http://www.isedb.com/news/article/1249 (Note: link removed as the page no longer exists).

The latest edition of "Climbing The Beanstalk", Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning's SEO newsletter was just published. For those of you who have not subscribed to our newsletter (which is free and can be signed up for by entering your email on the form box to the top right) you can find the latest edition at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/newsletters/30aug05.htm.

You can also read past newsletter on our article page at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/index.htm.

In a great article by iEntry CEO, Rich Ord, he discusses Google and the threat they pose to Microsoft. Included in the article are some interesting stats, Bill's take on Google, and great analysis of exactly why Gates really should be scared.

You can read this article on the WebProNews website here.

In a recent article by BusinessWeek they discuss Google and the recent moves they've been making into other sectors. While many of these moves seem highly related to attracting more visitors to Google.com, some of the decisions are either clouded in mystery or are leaving analysts (and at least this one SEO) scratching their heads. But while we may not know what they always have in mind, it's sure to shake up the Internet and computing world.

While I could regurgitate the information from the article it is definitely best read as written. The article is short and an easy read that will give the reader insight into some of the directions Google is moving in. Irrelevant to SEO? Hardly. Understanding what a major SE giant like Google is doing, even if it's not 100% understood why, will keep us ready to react to the changes in the industry well before others (including our online competitors :). and to understand these changes when they do occur.

You can read the article on the BusinessWeek website at http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_36/b3949050_mz011.htm.

While doing my generaly rounds of the forums and SEO resource sites I stumbled on an article by fellow SEO Stoney deGeyter. In his article he made reference to a tool that his team had developed mainly for their inhouse use but which they've now released in beta for general use.

What this tool does is monitor websites weekly for changes to the code. What this does for us as SEO's and which would also be invaluable for webmasters or even website owners who want to know what's going on with their site is monitor the site weekly and emails you when changes have been made. They even thought so far as to include a bit of code you can place around content that you know changes often so it isn't reported to you (such as the blog update on the Beanstalk homepage in the right nav).

The tool is called CodeMonitor and best of all, it's currently free. :) You can sign up for the service at http://www.emarketingperformance.com/tools/codemonitor/.

On a slighly more personal note I'd like to thank Stoney for taking the time to speak with me about this tool. As President of the strategic search engine marketing firm PolePosition I'm sure he has a hectic schedule but it's good to know that like us, he'll still take time to speak with fellow SEO's.

This is definitely a recommended resource for any SEO or webmaster.

For those of you just getting your feet wet in SEO there's a good article by fellow SEO Jim Hedger on SearchEngineGuide.com that covers some of the basics of search engine optimization.

In the beginning of the article Jim notes that the article assumes a few things:

"The first assumption is a single, small business site is being worked on. The second assumption is that the site in question is written using a fairly standard mark-up language such as HTML or PHP. The last assumption is that some form of keyword research and determination has already taken place and the webmaster is confident in the selection of keyword targets."

This is a good read for the beginner and may even give vetran SEO's a little reminder that sometimes it's important to keep it simple and remember the basics. A good reminder.

You can read the entire article at http://www.searchengineguide.com/hedger/005450.html.

If you find this article interesting you'll probably also be interesting in the article "Anatomy Of An Internet Search Engine" written by Beanstalk which can ve viewed on our site.

Beanstalk today published a two-part series on how to properly and thoroughly analyze your online competition so that you can replace them on the first page of the major search engines.

Part one of this two part series covers onsite factors such as titles and meta tags, keyword density and more. Part two covers external factors such as in-depth link analysis.

You can read these articles at:

Part One (onsite factors)
Part Two (external factors)

I just recieved notification from TopNet Solutions that they will be offering Pr Prowler for $47 for the month of September.

For those of you who aren't aware of this product, as far as we're concerned it is THE product for links building. Essentially it go out and finds sites related to your keywords with high PageRanks and reports them back to you. It reduced our link-building time to about 30% of what it had been based mainly on the fact that the links it found for us were of such high quality that the number required were reduced significantly.

You can read a review of this product on the Beanstalk website at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/pr-prowler.htm.

comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In July 2005, Google maintained its market share lead in the U.S. search market with 36.5 percent of all the searches submitted, followed by Yahoo! at 30.5 percent and MSN at 15.5 percent.

Some interesting additional factors they found were:

• Market consolidation continued as the top six search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Time Warner (AOL), Ask Jeeves, and InfoSpace accounted for 99.4 percent of all searches, up from 98.5 percent in July 2004
• MSN-Microsoft saw the highest search volume gain among any of the top search engines, rising 30 percent from July 2004, accounting for 744 million domestic searches

To put it in perspective in regards to the authority of comScore's accuracy and relevancy - their services are used by the top six search engines.

You can read the full report on the comScore website at http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=622.

In order to provide our clients with the level of service they have come to expect from Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning and to insure that the resources are available to meet our obligations to them, Beanstalk will not be taking any new clients on until September 5, 2005.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.

This notice does not apply to our SEO consulting services or to clients to which a quote or review has been perfomed on or before August 18, 2005.

For more information or if you have any question please feel free to contact us directly.

Google today announced that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public offering by the company of 14,159,265 shares of Class A common stock.

What does this mean to SEO's, PPC manager, and webmasters (especially those who are part of the AdWords or AdSense programs)? Basically it means that more than ever Google is going to be putting profit ahead of their philosophy of "don't be evil". Google will now have an even stronger "responsibility" to their shareholders and, as with many public companies, this means profits before ethics.

We'll be watching this one closely to monitor for changes in revenue generated by webmasters as part of the AdSense program and for increasing costs for the AdWords program.

A copy of the prospectus relating to these securities may be obtained, when available, from: Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated, Prospectus Department, 1585 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 or Credit Suisse First Boston LLC, Prospectus Department, One Madison Avenue, New York, NY
10010.

Feedster has just published it's list of the top 500 most interesting and important blogs for August.

Unfortunatley the Beanstalk SEO News blog didn't make the list this month :( but it's still a good list to take a peek at if you interested in finding blog trends (and remember what we learned from comScore's blog report which we noted here back on August 8.

You can view the full list each month by visiting http://top500.feedster.com/ (Note: hyperlink removed as it's no longer up).

Every once in a while someone in "authority" steps forward and says, "the Emperor has no cloths." Well today it was Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch. Danny is the Editor of SEW, arguably THE authority resource on search engines.

Yahoo! and Google are currently in the midst of a "who's index is bigger" contest. Here's what Danny had to say (in summary) about it:

"This is Search Engine Size Wars VI, by my count. It's absurd. It's annoying. It's a friggin' waste of time. Instead of advancing to a commonly accepted relevancy figure, the search engines want to keep us mired in the mud of who's biggest."

And seriously, that about summarizes the truth of the matter. Bigger isn't always better, sometimes what's important is what you do with what you've got.

Danny does a great job of explaining why size is virtually irrelevant and I won't try to do better in a blog post than he's done over a full article of great reading. You can read Danny's article on the Search Engine Watch website at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3527636.

A great article was published today (which makes two including Beanstalk "Ecommerce & SEO" published earlier today. The article titled "Are You A Natural? Organic SEO" by WebPronews writer Chris Richardson covers some discussions had at the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference.

The article is based on a panel discussion (the panel consisted of Mike Grehan, CEO, Smart Interactive, Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay Inc., David Naylor of DaveNaylor.com, and Todd Freisen of Range Online Media) and covers such issues as:

• Link buying
• The sandbox
• Duplicate content, and
• Subdomains

A very good read by an author who knows his stuff, you can read it in full on the WebProWorld website by clicking here.

An article was just released into publication today by Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. The article, titled "Ecommerce & SEO" covers some of the significant shortcomings of the vast majority of shopping cart systems and the cost to the site owner fo these including their inability to be indexed properly by search engines.

The article is based in part on an interview with Lee Roberts, accessibility expert and creator of the Apple Pie Shopping Cart.

You can read the article on the Beanstalk website at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/ecommerce.htm.

I just found an interesting (though SEO unrelated) article on the Forbes website from back on the 8th. As it turns out, Japanese researchers have "built" the first remote controlled human. Using a headphone-like device, a human being can be controlled remotely through a DC current delivered to the mastoid behind the ear.

This effect causes the person to shift their center of gravity and, if the current is high enough, this shift will cause them to change directions in movement.

In it's first stages this crude devise is bulky and serves no particular practical purposes howeverif we consider that the first computer (to the right) was 7,000 kg (60,000 lb), and contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes and yet still did less than a calculator you could buy at a dollar store today one has to wonder where this technology is going.

You can read the full article and watch a short video of this technology "in motion" on the Forbes website by clicking here.

All indications based on their current crawling of sites indicates that a Google update is coming within the next couple weeks. If this update is similar to those that have generally occured following their past deep and thorough crawls of sites it will include a backlink update, and internal PR update (meaning you won't see it on your toolbar but it will affect the internal calculations done by the Big G) and an algorithm update.

Judging from the sites I have seen them spending more time crawling than others it appears that they may also be "learning" a bit more about how to properly index more complicated PHP-based sites and probably deal with a couple CSS abuse issues.

Watch the Beanstalk News Blog and we'll keep you posted as to when the update occurs. :)

There has been much rumour that Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google, is the infamous GoogleGuy of the WebmasterWorld forums. Whether these rumours are true or not he is definitely an authority on all things Google.

The good news of the day is that Matt has recently started a blog on Google and SEO (with a few other webmaster tips tossed in). This blog is definitely one to watch as a Google software engineer gives tips on how to optimize your site.

Definitely a page to add to your favorites and visit regularly, you can view it at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

MSN will be announcing next week the upcoming launch of MSN Keywords (read: MSN AdWords) in the fall. The program, already active in France and Singapore, stands to challenge Google's AdWords and as I'm sure one Mr. Bill Gates is hoping, will significantly decrease Google's quarterly earnings in the fourth quarter of 2005.

The launch in the US is scheduled for October in test form; according to Joe Doran, Senior Director of MSN in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. These types of ads make up the fastest growing segment of onlie marketing grossing $3.9 billion last year and estimated to realize a 40% growth this year, up to $5.4 billion.

Is it a surprise that MSN want's a piece of THAT pie?

In a great article by Kevin Kelly, an author for Wired Magazine, he outlines and documents through a short 5 part series, the entire history of the net, the early skeptics, and the struggles undertaken by the pioneers to "force" us to accept what we now take for granted as a necessity.

From the first core ideas of the 1940's to the present, this article gives insight into how the web was made, who made it (believe it or not it wasn't Al Gore), and all that came after.

This won't help you rank your site better as most of our SEO blog news is geared towards however it will give you a better understanding of what we're working with and understanding how the Internet has evolved may shed some light on where it's headed.

"Knowledge Is Power," as they say.

You can read the entire areticle series on the Wired site at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html.

There's currently a VERY useful post that lists off many of the useful and high ranking directories. A great start for your link building endevours.

The post was initially started by one of my favorite members greeneagle (his real name's Ken). Started on June 13th it's now 9 pages long of some great directory lists.

You can visit the forum thread at http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=21900.

Beanstalk has entered into a partnership with search engine and directory ExactSeek.

ExactSeek, through the ISEDN network provides an exceptional value to Beanstalk's clients with their paid inclusion system. At only $12/yr they provide rankings on over 40+ search engines and directories for a specific keyword phrase. At $12/yr it's worth buying multiple phrases related to your indictry.

Comparing our statistics on ExactSeek vs PPC engines the cost-per-click is exceptionally low and with the addition of all these new sites to the network the number of click has gone up significantly. The bonus is, it doesn't cost per click so the added traffic is "free".

For more information on their promotions you can visit Beanstalk's page on their site at http://store.exactseek.com/beanstalk.html.

comScore's at it again ... providing useful and insightful information on Internet trends. Those of you who've been following the Beanstalk SEO blog for a while now may remember that comScore is the company that provided us last month with the useful tid-bit that MSN searchers are more likely to purchase online than any other surfer.

Well today they just released the finding of their latest study on blog user patterns and demogrphics and it's definitely worht noting if you have or are planning to add a blog to your site. Some of the key points they found are:

• 50 million US Internet users visited a blog since the 1st quarter of 2005.
• political blogs are the most popular, followed by lifestyle blogs, tech blogs, and blogs authored by women.
• blog readers tend to be from more affluent households, younger, and use high-speed connectivity.
• blog readers on average visit twice as many web pages as the average Internet user.
• blog readers are more likely to purchase produces and services online.
  

Additionally interesting is that the top blog site blogspot.com now has more visitors than mainstream media sites NYTimes.com, USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com showing that blogs are starting to "come of age" and be accepted as legitimate sources of information.

There are also some interesting demographical information brought forward:

• blog visitors are 11% more likely than the average surfer to have a household income of over $75,000.
• blog visitors are 30% more likely to live in a household where the head of that household is between the ages of 18 and 34.
• blog visotirs are 11% more likely that the average Internet user to use broadband connectivity.
• the average blog visitor spends 23 hours per week online as opposed to the average 13.
• blog visitors are 30% more likely to purchase products and services online and will spend an average of 6% more when they do.

For more information on blog visitor user behaviour you can read their full report at http://www.comscore.com/blogreport/comScoreBlogReport.pdf.

The latest edition of "Climbing The Beanstalk", Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning's bi-weekely newsletter was just published. For those of you who have not subscribed to our newsletter (which is free and can be signed up for by entering your email on the form box to the top right) you can find the latest edition at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/newsletters/7aug05.htm.

You can also read past newsletter on our article page at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/index.htm.

On August 3rd (sorry for the delay in getting this news to our blog folks) Yahoo! announced it's intentions to launch Yahoo! Publisher. Yahoo! Publisher is an advertising network similar to Google's AdSense, allowing webmasters to display Yahoo!'s Paid Advertising on their site for a percentage of the revenue generated from the ad when clicked.

The program, currently in beta, is only available through invitation however I imagine that unless they hit some serious snags we'll see it roll out in the very near future to take advantage of the lucrative Christmas season.

With Google's AdSense under attack from many webmasters who feel they're not being paid a fair percentage (and aren't even sure they're getting a percentage of everything they should) Yahoo! stands well positioned to capitalize on this ill-will and, provided they offer an attractive payout to website owners, they could very well take a solid chunk out of Google's earnings which are, at this time, generated largely from AdWords.

To apply for the beta testing program or for more information you can visit http://publisher.yahoo.com/.

In part two of a two part series on search engine penalties Marcela De Vivo, the owner of SEOmind.com discusses Yahoo! and MSN specifically. As with part one (see yesterday's blog post) the conclusions must be taken with a grain of salt however the theories are correct.

You can read the article on the Search Engine Watch website at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3525086.

A very good article entitled "Coping with Search Engine Penalties" was published today on Search Engine Watch. The article, written by Marcela De Vivo, the owner of SEOmind.com, covers penalties, non-penalties, and gives some ood advice on what to do if you find your site subject to one.

While I disagree with a couple points such as his claim that if you remove the offending content/code, that the site should bounce back in a month or so, it is well written and gives some solid information. This article is recommended reading for anyone who thinks they might be subject to a penalty or would like to avoid them altogether.

You can read the full article on the Search Engine Watch website at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3524751.

Yahoo! has updated the backlinks they show in their link counts.

As Google generally only shows a small percentage of the total number of links we have always used Yahoo! to get a better idea of where we, our clients, and the competition stand.

If you'd like to check your backlinks on Yahoo! you have to do it slightly different than on Google. Whereas on Google you have to enter "link:www.yourdomain.com" into the search field, on Yahoo! you have to enter "link:http://www.yourdomain.com". If you forget to enter the "http://" it's not going to work.

Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning Inc. has been invited (and accepted) an invitation to join the list of consultants associated with the Gerson Lehrman Group out of New York.

We look forward to offering our expertise and knowledge to their prestigious list of clientelle and would like to take the opportunity to thank them publicly for the opportunity. We're sure it will be a long and mutually beneficial relationship.