Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

The most recent article by Beanstalk has just been published. Entitled "W3C Compliance & SEO" it covers how bringing your website into compliance with W3C standards can help your website improve in the rankings and also improve the visitor experience.

The article is based on experience Beanstalk has had with it's own site, client sites and also with the help of Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design who lent great insight into compliance and resources to help you, our valued readers, gain a deeper understanding of what the W3C is and how to bring your own site into compliance with their standards.

A special thanks to Frederick for his help.

Shawn of TopNet Solutions was kind enough to offer Beanstalk visitors and clients an exclusive deal. For the month of September, Beanstalk's visitors who purchased PR Prowler were given the software at a very significant discount (regularly $97, our visitors get it for $47).

This SEO tool is used in every one of our SEO and link building contracts and paid for itself after the first one. Allowing us to find high PageRank relevant links in a fraction of the time it takes to do it from straight surfing. How much is your time worth? For most, at $47 if it saves you even 3 or 4 hours on your one site it's worth it. In reality it will save you many many more and increase the effectiveness of the links you do get meaning your rankings will improve faster and the ROI for your SEO efforts will be realized much quicker.

If you haven't yet I can't recommend this tool enough. Easily the most used of all our SEO software it's a must have.

To get PR Prowler for $47 you'll have to use the link at the bottom of our PR Prowler review page. It contains a special tracking code that automatically discounts the product, otherwise you'll have to pay $97 just like anyone who doesn't visit the Beanstalk site. :)

In an interesting addition to Dave's article of the 27th titled "Google Drops The Count" - Google has published a page where they talk in depth about their index size and how they consider it to be three times larger than any other search engine's.

So how big is Google's index?
Search engines' published metrics for index size measurement vary greatly and are no longer easily comparable. Often, for instance, web crawlers retrieve duplicate entries for one page or links to documents that they haven't crawled, and whose content thus isn't in the index. At Google we believe the essential quality of an index isn't the total number of documents, but its comprehensiveness – which unique documents are in the index. So we don't count duplicate or uncrawled pages. According to our internal testing, our newly expanded search index is more than three times larger than that of any other search engine.

It once again shows that google is more interested in quality, rather than quantity -- but by focussing on the quality, they have appear to have achieved quantity as well. We'll be interested to see how Yahoo! responds to this.
Link: http://www.google.com/help/indexsize.html

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you read blogs and SEO newsletters to keep up with the latest SEO news and to glean some insight into the search engines then Jill Whalen's High Rankings Advisor newsletters is a must-subscribe-to resource.

I just received today's edition and after giving it a read, thought ... that's definitely worthy of a mention and reference on our blog. Unfortunately when I went to the High Rankings site the newsletter wasn't yet posted so I'm going to have to copy it below (and then email Jill and tell her ... remember folks, people will give you permission if you ask nicely and provide credit so copyright infringements are completely unnecessary and unwarranted).

The only portions editted out of the newsletter are the ads though I'd still recommend visiting Jill's site (link below) and sign up for the newsletter.

~~~High Rankings™ Advisor - Issue No. 149~~~

Your Host: Jill Whalen [jill@highrankings.com]

______________________________________________________

~~~IN TODAY'S ADVISOR~~~

*Introductory Comments:
----> Must-read SEO Secrets

*Search Engine Marketing:
----> Should I Add HTML Pages to a PHP Site?

*Guest Article:
----> How To Write Persuasive Subject Lines

*Stuff You Might Like:
----> High Rankings Seminar in Philadelphia

*High Rankings Forum Thread of the Week:
----> SEO Dilemma

*This Week's Sound Advice:
----> How Many Words Do You Need for High Rankings?

*Advisor Wrap-up:
----> Secrets Revealed

________________________________________________________

~~~Introductory Comments~~~

So did my subject line "Must-read SEO Secrets" get you to open today's newsletter when you may not have otherwise? I was just testing out Karon Thackston's advice in today's guest article! I don't want to disappoint you now that you clicked it open, though, so I'm going to wrack my brain to think of some SEO secrets to tell you here. Just give me a few minutes...hmmm...

I think we'd better get straight to the good stuff, and my hope is that the secrets will just start flowing...

~~~Search Engine Marketing Issues~~~

++Should I Add HTML Pages to a PHP Site?++

Hi Jill,

Following your guidelines, I have had excellent results optimizing regular html pages. Thank you!

I am currently doing an associate's site that is written in php with a content-management type of program. The pages are in php and not html. The program offers a way of adding in meta & title information for each page but it also has something that it calls "gateway html" and they designate it as being for search engine optimization. It is located in the same area that you will add specific title and meta data for a given page.

I believe that what it does is write out an html page of content that you input, but it is associated with the php page. It will share the same name, title and meta attributes, but you can input different html there than will be viewed in the php page. It will have the same name as the original page, but will be .html instead of .php.

My question is, does this fall foul of "cloaking" whereby you are showing different content via the php and html versions of the same basic page? I have never done anything like this before and I am afraid of having problems with the search engines for fear of cloaking.

Could you please give me your opinion on this?

Thanks very much.

Mark

++Jill's Response++

Hi Mark,

If I understand you correctly, creating that extra HTML page through your content management system is not something that you need to do. It may have been worthwhile many years ago (back in the age of the dinosaur) when the search engines avoided reading dynamic-looking web pages and adding them to their databases. However, this is no longer a problem.

Let's discuss what used to happen in the Stone Age of the Internet for a moment, so that you can have a better understanding of this whole dynamic-website issue that plagues so many people.

Many years ago, when search engine spiders saw a URL that seemed like it went to a dynamically generated site (because it had a bunch of parameters in it like question marks, equal signs, etc.), they wouldn't attempt to crawl it.

One of the reasons for this was that with dynamic sites, you would often find the same content delivered to the user (or browser or spider) under multiple URLs. So for instance, on an ecommerce site that sold hats, you might be able to get to the black ten-gallon cowboy hat that you had your eye on through a URL that was something like this:

www.MyAwesomelyCoolHatShop.com/index.php?category=cowboy&color=black&type=tengallon.php

This user may have browsed for cowboy hats, then chose the color black, and then the ten-gallon type.

You might also get to the same exact hat page through another URL like this:

www.MyAwesomelyCoolHatShop.com/index.php?color=black&type=10gallon&cat egory=cowboy

This user may have been looking for a black hat to start out, and then decided on the 10 gallon cowboy type.

These are similar but different URLs that both have the potential for being added to a search engine's database. When that happens it creates a whole pile of URLs for exactly the same content, which is one of the reasons the search engines would avoid them. Another reason for their avoidance was that the search engine spiders had the potential for getting stuck in a sort of infinite loop while they were trying to gather up all the pages. With so many different ways to categorize the products, and so many ways for a user to land at the same page, the spider might end up going around in circles. Search engines and website owners don't like that because it can eat up server resources.

Years ago it was easier for the search engines to simply avoid those types of sites, as they were few and far between. Since site owners still wanted to get their sites into the search engines, savvy programmers learned how to create URLs and pages that were friendlier to the search spiders. Some figured out how to make dynamic-looking URLs into static-looking ones by rewriting the URLs so that they didn't use parameters. Others created workarounds whereby the content management system would spit out HTML files that were more crawler-friendly, such as the system Mark was talking about in his question.

Fast-forward a few years.

As websites and businesses began to grow, more and more site owners turned to content management systems to dynamically generate the pages of their websites. It was a whole lot easier and faster and just made sense. Dynamically generated pages were definitely not going to go away, so of course it was in the search engines' best interests to figure out how they could index the information contained on them.

And so they did.

Today's search engines generally have no problem with dynamically generated pages. They don't scurry away as fast as they can when they see a .php or an .asp or a .cfm extension in a URL. They don't even flee when they see parameters in the URLs. Question marks and equal signs have no spider-repelling powers anymore. While I don't understand all the programming behind it, I do know for a fact that the search engines definitely index *most* dynamic-looking URLs just fine.

Notice that I said *most* -- not *all*.

Some believe that if you have more than 3 parameters in the URL, you may have less of a chance at getting those URLs indexed. I've seen some of those in the search engines' databases, however, so it's not a hard-and-fast rule.

Another problem for the search engines is when you require session IDs in your URL. The engines still try to avoid this type of URL because every spider visit to the site might create a completely different ID number and thus a new URL. The engines still prefer to keep hundreds of the same page out of their databases, so they have learned to look for the telltale signs of session-ID URLs in order to avoid indexing them. Because of this you should avoid using "SID=whatever" in your URLs if you want your pages indexed. Plus, Google has stated on their FAQ page for webmasters that they don't index URLs that have "&id" in them, so definitely stay away from those as well.

In answer to the original question posed by Mark regarding cloaking:

From how he described it, creating those pages wouldn't be considered cloaking, just unnecessary. There's no reason to create duplicate pages of the same content that's most likely already being indexed by the search engines.

If you do choose to use the extra pages, then you'll probably want to exclude the dynamically-generated PHP URLs via the robots.txt exclusion file and allow the engines to index only your .html/.htm files. But again, you'll be much better off to just ignore that function of your CMS. If for some reason you start noticing that none of your dynamic pages are getting into the search databases, you may wish to rethink this, but I doubt you will have any indexing problems.

Hope this helps!

Jill

(P.S. If anyone would like to republish the above Q&A article, please email me your request and where it will reside, and I'll send you a short bio you can use with it for your site.)

__________________________________________________

~~~Guest Article~~~

++How To Write Persuasive Subject Lines++

Copywriting queen Karon Thackston writes today's guest article on subject lines. You can learn from and meet Karon in person at our High Rankings™ seminar on Nov. 3-4 in Philadelphia, where she will be discussing how to write copy that speaks to your target audience as well as to the search engines.

Without further ado...here's Karon! - Jill

How To Write Persuasive Subject Lines

By Karon Thackston

Three seconds and 40 characters. That's all you usually have to work with when trying to get and hold the attention of someone reading email. And with user behavior changing so much in response to overwhelming amounts of spam, the attention spans of email readers are getting shorter. Needless to say, it's vital to make the most of your introduction via the email subject line.

Email marketing powerhouse DoubleClick.com conducts annual surveys with regard to user behavior when it comes to email. A couple of the statistics from their latest findings are interesting. The second-biggest motivator in opening email is the subject line. (The first is the "from" line.)

Because subject lines are often truncated at around 40 characters -- and because email readers usually have their index fingers poised over the delete button -- we're left with about three seconds and approximately six words to make an impression. So what works? Which types of subject lines have proven to be successful? Here are my top three:

1. Make An Offer

It's an old sales cliché that still holds true in the fast-paced world of cyberspace: Lead with your best offer. Whether a product, service, or proposal, you want to tell people up front about your deepest discounts, your fastest delivery, or your grandest idea. Get their attention right off the bat, and you'll likely have your message read. (It's even better if your offer happens to be time-sensitive.)

Examples include:

"Half Off Leather Boots Until March 1st"

"Top 10 Reasons To Attend [Whatever]"

"Your Link on High-ranking Web Pages"

2. State a Benefit

Since the majority of consumer and B2B customers live in the "what's in it for me" world, benefits always make powerful subject lines.

Telling the readers what the end results of their actions will be helps them visualize the need for your product or service. Here are a few examples based on the subject lines above:

"Wear Fall's Hottest Trends for 50% Off"

"Learn [Whatever] in Only Two Days"

"Build Link Popularity & Traffic for Your Site"

3. Evoke Curiosity

We're all nosy to a point. Our curiosity gets the best of us, and we want to know more. That's not only true when it comes to watching movie previews on TV. It's also true for email as well. Some of the best subject lines hook readers by piquing their curiosity, and then reel them in to read the entire message.

"Are You Still Wearing These Fashion "Don'ts"?"

"The Secrets to [Whatever] Never Before Revealed"

"Link-popularity Scams You Should Avoid"

Of course, the key to writing the best subject lines is knowing your target customers, making the topic relevant, and testing, testing, testing.

The other interesting fact from the DoubleClick email survey is that relevancy is a major player. Over 55% of respondents said they deleted email that wasn't relevant because they considered it spam. DoubleClick also reported that the average open rate was 27.5% (for text or HTML messages). That gives you a baseline to gauge your success.

Not every type of subject line will work for every campaign. Testing is vital. And it's easy enough to do. One of my favorite ways is to set up a Google AdWords campaign and judge the clickthrough rates. This quickly (and cheaply) tells you which subject lines will work and which won't. You can also test your subject lines by sending your emails to a smaller test list before broadcasting to the entire group.

Whichever styles of subject lines you choose, make sure you know your target audience so you can develop relevant subject lines. Then test and test again until you've created subjects that are highly persuasive and deliver record-breaking open rates.

Karon Thackston Copywriting Course: http://www.copywritingcourse.com How To Increase Your Keyword Saturation: http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword

__________________________________________________

~~~Stuff You Might Like~~~

++High Rankings™ Seminar in Philadelphia++

We're getting a good response so far to our Nov. 3-4 search marketing seminar in Philadelphia! Please remember that in order to save money with the early registration, you'll need to register by Oct. 6th. If you missed last issue's top 10 reasons why you need to attend this seminar, you can read them here: http://www.highrankings.com/issue148.htm#stuff.

We should have more info by the next newsletter on the cocktail reception for the night of Nov. 3rd. This will be open to the public, so even if you somehow decide you can't make it to the seminar, we'd still love to meet you at the reception!

To learn more about everything that is included in the seminar, i.e., usability, keyword research, SEO copywriting for your target audience, writing and maintaining PPC ads, tracking traffic and conversions, advanced link-building, spotting search engine spam, and more, please visit the seminar page here: http://www.highrankings.com/seminar.

~~~High Rankings™ Forum Thread of the Week~~~

++SEO Dilemma++

Forum member "Clueless" wonders how he could possibly optimize a poetry site without compromising it for his site visitors. In the process Clueless became a little more clued-in and learned a whole lot about how categorizing stuff is not only a great SEO technique, but usually makes sites much more user-friendly.

Read the thread and share your own thoughts here: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17053.

__________________________________________________

~~~Sound Advice~~~

++How Many Words Do You Need for High Rankings?++
http://www.highrankings.com/soundadvice
(This audio recording changes each week.)

~~~Advisor Wrap-up~~~

That's it for today!

Oh wait, I still didn't provide you with your "must-read SEO secrets" did I? (Raise your hand if you scrolled down here first when you saw "secrets revealed" in the table of contents!)

Hmm...well...umm...you're not gonna like this very much, but I have to be honest with you as that's my nature. The real secret, and the full truth of the matter is...that there are NO secrets when it comes to SEO. There's no magic formula, no special trick all the top SEOs know but that they won't tell anyone else. Nothing to it but hard work, love for your site, and the dream of making it the best it can be for your users and the search engines. In 10 years of doing this, I've learned that you don't have to get bogged down in the details in this business. You might easily be fooled into thinking that you do, but in reality you don't. Amazingly enough, the details often make no difference whatsoever to your rankings. It's always the big-picture stuff that provides the most astounding results.

So if you want to learn all the big-picture stuff, continue to read this newsletter, the forum, and -- if you can possibly swing it -- come to our seminar in November. One day it will all just "click" for you and you will know exactly what I mean when I say there *are* no SEO secrets.

Catch you next time! - Jill

Today's issue will be available in the archives at the following URL: http://www.highrankings.com/issue149.htm

--

Please send all questions to mailto:newsletter@highrankings.com.

If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here: http://www.highrankings.com/high-rankings-advisor.xml.

I do send personal replies as time allows, however, I do not give out individual site critiques for free. Please check out my various SEO services if you're interested in a complete review of your site.

Visit the High Rankings Advisor website at http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm and don't forget to check out the High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum at: http://www.highrankings.com/forum.

Best Regards,

Jill Whalen

http://www.highrankings.com

I hope that you enjoyed the read as much as I did.

Remember to visit Jill's High Rankings website and sign up for her newsletter. She's always helpful and one of the SEO's we at Beanstalk pay close attention to.

I noticed today that there are an absolutely amazing amount of news stories being released about our favorite search company Google. I figured it might be good to post a collection of them in one place :-)

To start with, Marisa Mayer is Google's 20th employee and is one the main people driving the search company's successive, innovative products. There are two articles about her over at Business Week at the moment -- both of them quite interesting and both offering some insight into how the company operates, including tid-bits about it's corporate culture.

From the first linked article:

Part of Mayer's challenge is realizing when certain formulas falter. For years she ran the company's Top 100 priorities list, which ranked projects by order of importance. But as Google's workforce grew, the list soared to more than 270 projects. Last year Google execs decided it had run its course, and shut it down. "People don't get attached to the processes themselves at Google," says Bret Taylor, product manager for Google Maps. "It's very unusual. Even at small companies, people tend to say: 'This is the way we do X."'

Moving along, over at Silicon Beat (The San Jose Mercury News' blog), there's an article about how Google has apparently ended it's year-long boycott of the tech-news site CNET. From that article:

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has had a phone interview with CNET, the article says. That comes after Schmidt himself had supposedly imposed a year-long ban on the organization for publishing personal information about him that was easily retrievable with Google's search engine.

Wow. Lesson learned. Don't tick off Mr. Schmidt ;-)

Then again on the Silicon Beat, there is a post about an unconfirmed report that Google is to open a research facility at NASA Ames in Mountain View. Apparently this will be officially announced later this afternoon.

Meanwhile, Ars Technica is reporting about Google being sued over it's print library project. The Authors Guild states:

"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," said Authors Guild president Nick Taylor. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."

Personally, I wish people would relax about copyright issues -- especially when it comes to sharing work for educational pursuits -- but, hey, what do I know? ;-) Here's Google's take on the issue.

Finally, (I picked this one up off the Del.icio.us Popular feed) a tool that is strikingly similar to Twingine results, Gahoo!Yoogle appears to be a more robust version of the former, offering image, news, shopping and directory results from both Google and Yahoo! in a nifty split-screen format.

So, that concludes our collection of Google headlines for the day, with one small exception that I'm sure you'll get a great laugh from :-) Happy Surfing!!

FINALLY!

Google has removed from their homepage the infamous "number of indexed" pages count. Perhaps now the major search engines can all move on to focus on what's important ... relevancy.

Really, do you care if there's 187 trillion pages index if the results are lack-luster at best? Personally I'd rather use an engine with 10 indexed pages if the results were better. But maybe that's just me. :)

Robert X. Cringely is a long-time observer of the web and a pundit who regularly churns up controversy with his articles. From speculation on Apple's decision to switch to Intel to power it's next generation PC's (pun intended), to this week's article regarding the algorithm that dances behind Google's AdWords system, Mr. Cringely is always interesting and he's also been known to be "on the money" in his pondering.

I found this weeks article likely to be of particular interest and relevance to our audience on this blog because, of course, it deals with Google, but also because it deals with Google's "Do No Evil" corporate mantra.

From the article:

His old site with the same ads had been running successfully for a year paying at the relatively low rate of $0.10 per word (the Adwords minimum is $0.05 per word) and generating about 15,000 clicks-through per day. But for the new site, he started out paying $1.00 per word for exactly the same words. Based on everything he had read about Adwords (remember nobody actually SPEAKS to Google about these things -- the service is totally automated from Google's end), he expected his ad to move higher in the rankings and, hopefully, to make more sales as a result. And that's exactly what happened, though not to the extent that he would have liked.

Buying AdWords at $1.00 versus $0.10, his ads DID move higher on the page and his revenue was increased, though not by enough to justify going all the way to $1.00 with its associated higher cost basis.

All the while, of course, the essentially identical original web site was churning along, still entirely dependent on AdWords, still carrying identical ads for identical products as the test site, and still generating an average of 15,000 click-throughs per day.

Now it was time to drop the per-word price a bit on the test site to see whether he could increase his profit margins after paying too much at $1.00. So he set the new per-word price at $0.40 -- still four times as much as he was paying per word through his main site.

And his clicks-through dropped from 15,000+ to 1,200 per day.

Huh?

He goes on to say that, while he thinks this is a mysterious result, he thinks it smacks of being "Evil" and then quotes his friend comparing Google to a casino:

"It's like Vegas," said my friend. "They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs."

Personally, I think Cringely is quite off-base in saying this and while I think the article provokes some thought into how Google operates (even offering some measure of insight), I think he is, in essence, simply stirring the pot (again) and daring to find some "evil" agenda at Google.

I went hunting for discussion and criticism of this article and found this:

Cringely claims that the "only difference" between the two sets of ads is how Google treated them, but that's not true. One of the sites was quite established, and so Google has a long history of how the ads to that site performs. The other was new and had no such history. Considering that Google takes into account ad performance in how it positions the ads, it seems like that could be playing a factor here as well. I'm sure others who are much more involved in the Google AdWords world may have other theories as well -- but it still seems like a stretch to immediately jump to the conclusion that Google is specifically punishing anyone who lowers their ad bids.

The comments in response to this are enlightening and, on another blog (in the comments, not the post) I thought this was relevant:

It's possible that by upping the amount he was willing to pay per click, without modifying his daily budget, he burned the budget faster every day, causing the ads to stop running ... and simultaneously lowering traffic.

not enough parameters are given to accurately compare and make judgements here, all we've got is silly assumptions.

In conclusion: interesting read but he's grasping at straws on this one. 'nough said :-)

MSN yesterday (sorry for the slight delay in the notification) announced the launch of their paid search service in France and Singapore following successful pilot projects in both countries. The program is set to launch in the US in October though with a limited number of advertisers.

From the release it appears as though the MSN program will provide for some fantastic analysis and reporting tools. By their word they will provide:

• Keyword Selection allows advertisers to indicate whom they want
  to reach based on geographic location, gender, age range, time of day and
  day of week, and suggests keywords based on the desired audience.


• Site Analyzer assists advertisers by suggesting keywords based on
  the content of their Web site, rather than on another keyword.


• Audience Profiler provides advertisers with an expected profile
  of those customers who are most likely to search for specific keywords.


• Cost Estimator helps advertisers remain within their budget by estimating
  rank, traffic and cost per month per keyword.


• Campaign Optimization allows advertisers to respond quickly and
  decisively throughout the campaign to easily refine budget allocations and
  keywords, as well as apply targeting filters such as geographic, demographic
  and dayparting.


• Post Sales Audience Intelligence & Reporting provides advertisers
  with detailed reports on campaign performance and audiences reached including
  click-through rate, estimated position and spending levels.

You can read more information in MSN's press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/sep05/09-26PdSearchSvcPR.mspx. There's also a very good article and analysis by SEO Jennifer Laycock on the SearchEngineJuide website at http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/005707.html.

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/26sep05.htm.

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

Back on July 25th we announced on our blog that Google was running a coding competition with the winners receiving up to $10k and the attention of Google (the more valuable of the prises). Well the winners have been announced. Of over 14,000 registrants the winners are:

1. Marek Cygan, a student at Warsaw University
2. Erik-Jan Krijgsman, a student at the University of Wente in the Netherlands
3. Petr Mitrichev, a student at Moscow State University in Russia

Congratulation to all of you and honestly, to anyone who finished in the top 100 of this "extreme geek sporting event." :)

Periodically we at Beanstalk like to end the week and enter the weekend with a chuckle. On these Fridays we like to leave you with a humerous post to enter your weekend with. Today is just one of those days. :)

Some time ago I found a short clip of Robin Williams on Golf. Well I've found it again and after a viewing and a few solid chuckles I decided it was definitely a good candidate for a fun, though completely SEO unrelated, blog post.

The clip comes from "Robin Williams Live on Broadway". Almost as funny as his comments on golf is the vast number of water bottles the man goes through in a performance. :)

I feel it's only responsible to note that while this clip is very funny there are a few instances of a word the rhymes with "truck". If this won't bother you I highly recommend watching Robin Williams On Golf.

Alright, so my first post to the SEO Blog isn't so much Search Engine-related, but it does offer a great heads up :-)

For those of you looking for a great way to follow RSS feeds (like ours), yesterday, Opera, a long time player in the web-browser market, announced that it's going FREE and it includes a seriously cool method to read newsfeeds (like ours).

Traditionally, the browser has been "adware" -- meaning users who chose to use the software had to put up with integrated (though unobstrusive) advertising in the corners of the screen.

From the Opera web site:

The most full-featured Internet power tool on the market, Opera includes pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, integrated searches, and advanced functions like Opera's groundbreaking E-mail program, RSS Newsfeeds and IRC chat. And because we know that our users have different needs, you can customize the look and content of your Opera browser with a few clicks of the mouse.

Personally, I've always loved Opera, so I was excited to see their new (free)direction and I think their take on the RSS reader is awesome and may just end up replacing my current newsreader(OS X only).

For those not in-the-know, here's a little background information on "web syndication" and how it's supposed to work.

Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning would like to thank artist Sherry Lynn Ewacha for a fantastic painting as commissioned by Beanstalk. Entitled "The Beanstalk", it accurately and beautifully reflects what we were hoping for, the climbing to new heights.

Sherry was wonderful to work with and we would highly recommend her if you are seeking a corporate painting that will portray your companies' business and direction.

For more information on Sherry or to view her other work (varied styles but all very good) you can visit her website at http://www.astarvingartist.ca/.

Again, thanks Sherry for a great job and for the pleasant interactions we had.

Ogden Point Software has just increased the free alotment of bandwidth on their free remote access software. I've been using this software for quite a while and it's saved my butt more than once so I found it worth mentioning.

The software in question is called File4Ward and what it does is allows the used to login to their PC from any browser including a cell phone with web access or PDA and forward themselves files from their competer via email. You can send files to your co-workers, business associates, friends, etc.

The enhancement they've added recently that is of serious importance is the use of encryption. Rather than directly emailing the file it is stored on a server with an email being sent notifying the recipient of the URL where they can pick it up. For additional security you can password-protect the file so only someone you know and have given the password to will be able to get it. And when it's uploaded/downloaded it's over a 128 bit encrypted connection.

To add more, they've increased the amount of traffic you get from 5MB when I first started using the software to 500MB now.

If nothing else I highly recommend downloading it and testing it out. You can get this software free at http://www.penokio.com/file4ward/. It won't help you with SEO but it will help you with business. :)

The fine folks at WordTracker have just released a great book on keyword research and how to use it for natural SEO campaigns and paid promotions (different tactics, equally important). The best thing about this book ... IT'S FREE!

Of course it contains a lot of WordTracker promotional materials however it also provides a solid amount of very useful information and WordTracker itself is a solid tool and one that's used here at Beanstalk for keyword research.

If you're about to launch into a natural SEO or PPC campaign and want to do keyword analysis that goes way past what the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool can do I'd recommend checking our WordTracker but first, you might as well download the free book first and get a better understanding of what you should be looking for in a search phrase.

Here's a useful link to add to your favorites. http://www.twingine.com/.

It used to be yagoohoogle.com. What this site does is allows you to run a search and then provides the results from both Google and Yahoo! at once side by side.

A great tool for helping to understand the different results from the two largest engines. If you read them right you just might unlock the secret to ranking on both engines. :)

Good luck !

We just wanted to post a reminder in our blog that PR Prowler, one of our favorite and most-used SEO tools is on sale for the month of September.

The software, usually $97 and worth every penny, is on sale to Beanstalk visitors for only $47. This offer is available only through the Beanstalk website. If you visit our review page at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/pr-prowler.htm you will find a link to the PR prowler site at the bottom of the page.

This link has a special tracking code that will automatically adjust the price for PR prowler to $47.

We would like to thank Shawn at TopNet for extending this offer exclusively to our visitors and clients.

There a great post on the WebProWorld forum regarding the purchase of AOL by MSN.

An excellent piece with some well thought-out points to make in regards to how this will affect the search landscape, it's definitely a "should read" ... though perhaps you'll want to wait until after the weekend. Suppose that depends if you're as "geeky" as we are. ;)

You can read the post on the WebProWorld site at http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=52547.

I received an interesting email from a woman in Yellowstone earlier today. The email contained an interesting request, they are hoping to find someone interested in performing SEO services on their PR6 site in exchange for some free time in Yellowstone and Jackson Hole and were wondering if we could help them find someone.

It was also indicated in their email that until now they have been using the services of SEO Paul Bruemmer, which left me completely unsurprised to find them on the first page for a number of related searches. I have read many of Paul's articles and have a great deal of respect for his opinions, even when I may disagree with some of the analysis.

Based on this I replied that I wouldn't try to help find a replacement for Paul as they were more likely to lose rankings than gain them, depending on who they got. From this Shelli (the woman who emailed the request) replied that they will still be employing Paul's consulting services and that the SEO done will be based on his recommendations.

And so I decided that this was not only an opportunity to help out one of our visitors (which I always like to do) but also an opportunity to extend a great opportunity to our blog readers. If you are willing to perform SEO services (tweaking of the site and link building) in exchange for some time in Yellowstone you will have the great opportunity to work under the guidance of Paul Bruemmer. Quite honestly, this opportunity is worth it solely for the chance to pick up some quality information from one of the better SEO's out there, consider the vacation a bonus.

The site in question is http://www.yellowstonepark.com/.

If you are interested you can email Shelli at shelli@yellowstonepark.com.

There's a good article posted on WebPronews by SEO John Krycek of TheMouseWorks.

The article, titled "Keywords, Competition And Being Number One" outlines many strategies involved with improving your rankings and beating our those who hold top positions. One this I really liked about the article is that it places, correctly, a good deal of weight on the keyword selection and competition analysis. Truly very important steps that are often given only minimal weight.

The only real point I would argue from the article comes near the very end where he writes, "Don't ever believe anyone who says they can guarantee any kind of results." If there are 10 results in the top 10 and one understands that factors involved with getting there then it's a matter of doing what the sites there have done and then a bit more. But of course I may be biased as at Beanstalk we offer guaranteed services.

You can read the article in full on the WebProNews website here.

If this article is of interest to you then you may also be interested in the recently published Beanstalk articles on competition analysis. You can find the article on onsite factor analysis here and the article on external and link factors here.

A Washington-state judge yesterday gave Dr. Kai-Fu Lee the go-ahead to work at Google stating that his job functions would not conflict with the one-year non-competition agreement he currently has with Microsoft.

Back in July when Dr. Lee joined the Google team to help develop their R&D center in China both Google and Lee were sued by Microsoft who argued that it was in breach of the non-competition agreement Lee had with them (while Google sarcastically points out they sued before having any idea what Lee's role was to be at Google and thus could not possible know whether there was any violation of the non-competition agreement).

For those interested you can read a profile of Dr. Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle here.

Today Google announced the launch of their blog search feature in beta at http://www.google.com/blogsearch.

With the ever-increasing popularity of blogs as sources of information on topics ranging from SEO and computer support to politics and recipes, this addition promises to be a fantastic and well-used resource for researchers and those seeking specific and current information on a topic.

How Do I Get My Blog In Their Search?

For information on getting your blog listed or for how to use their blog search feature (for those of you unfamiliar with searching ;) you can visit Google's "About Google Blog Search" page at http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html.

To read their announcement of the launch and for additional information you can visit http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/find-out-whats-happening-with-blog.html.

Dan Thies writes chapter one of SitePoint's Search Engine Marketing Kit. The chapter is a great read and is very informative. It covers the history and current state of search engines and how they work.

Recommended reading for the search engne novice or expert.

You can read the complete article on the SitePoint website at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-marketing-kit.

On September 7, 1998 Google was born.

It was on this date in the garage of a friend that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first opened their doors (reportedly with a garage door remote).

Back in September 1998 Google was answering 10,000 queries per day. Not matter what one might say about Google one thing's for sure:

You've come a long way baby.

For more information on Google's history you can read about it on their site at http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html.

Beanstalk would like to welcome Allan Haggett to our team.

Coming to us with years in the web design industry he brings with him a solid skill-set and we look forward to the opportunity to work him.

Back on August 18 Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning placed a hold on accepting new clients in order to better serve those that had entrusted us with their livelihood (a responsibility we take very seriously).

We are pleased to announce that this hold has been lifted and that we are once again accepting SEO clients.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

It appears as though a Google update may be about to begin.

Different datacenters are reporting a different number of backlinks which is often the first indication of an update. Rankings on these datacenters don't appears to have changed at this point which, if past updates are an indicator, we should begin to see in a week or so.

At this time we haven't seen any indication that a PageRank update is also underway however it's too soon into the update to be sure. There is also the chance that this update will include a reduction on "sandbox" penalties which is expected however again, it's too early to tell.

Watch the Beanstalk SEO News Blog for more details over the next few days. You'll find a button in the top right of this page which will easily allow you to add this page to your favorites.

TopNet Solutions is offering their PR Prowler software at an enormous discount for Beanstalk clients and website visitors. The software, regularly $97 and worth every penny, is being offered for $47 for the month of September.

This deal is being offered exclusively to Beanstalk clients and visitors and thus we'd like to extend a special thanks for Shawn at TopNet for allowing us to promote a great tool at an even better price. :)

For more information on PR Prowler and how it can be used to help in building high PageRank, highly relevant links you can read the review of it on the Beanstalk website at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/pr-prowler.htm.