Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

There is a new article out by Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. on optimizing your website for higher MSN rankings. This article is part one in a four-part series on optimizing your website to rank highly accross all three major engines.

You can read the article in full on the Beanstalk site here.

Search engine Ask.com recently launched a great little feature (still in beta) whereby a tiny set of binoculars appears next to most results (still not fully propagates through all the index). When one mouses over the binoculars you can see a snapshot of the page in question.

This great feature is said (probably truthfully) to reduce the pogo effect (going back and forth between sites and the search results) by up to 50%. This is a HUGE time saver for those who search often.

I've long liked the Ask.com results for specific types of searches and this feature makes them even more attractive. To test it out visit Ask.com and simply run a search for something (and let me guess, it'll be YOUR primary phrase ;)

If you'd like to read a bit more about it you can also visit the Binoculars FAQ page here.

There's a great extension for Firefox that many of you (if not all of you) probably don't know about yet. While it's not some great SEO tool it will definitely help you in your research and it's also just a great idea.

The extension is called StmbleUpon. This extension allows surfers to rate sites. What it also does is allows the surfer who's on a site they like to hit the "Stumble" button which will take them to similar sites with related content that other StumbleUpon users have viewed favorably. This is a great tool for people doing research or who jsut want to save the time the would be spending running searches and spend that time reading content.

For example, someone visiting the Beanstalk site who hit the "Stumble" button may be taken to W3Schools or NVU, two great web design and authoring sites (I should note that we're happy to be associated with two such great resources).

As noted, it's not an SEO tool however it's very useful in helping you find quality sites related to a site you've already found and enjoyed.

You can download the extension off the Firefox site here. This won't work if you don't use Firefox as your browser. As noted in previous blog posts, Firefox is HIGHLY recommended for countless reasons. You can read more about it, download it, and find links to other useful SEO-related Firefox extension on the Beanstalk blog here.

There's an interesting article posted on the EntireWeb site "debating" the very question as to whether SEO is snake oil or science. Of course I am completely biased in my opinion that SEO is not snake oil and that there is a pure science to it. The author (Michael L. McGrath) did not point out in the article that good SEO is, by necessity, a "scientist". As we've noted in many articles, search engine operate by mathmatical algorithms and thus, also by necessity, there is a science to it. Any area that is governed by strick though moving factors must be considered a science. Gravity, because it is measurable, it a science. So too is SEO.

But for now I will step down off my soapbox and rather than debate SEO as a science will note that this article, for SEO's and for site owners alike, is a good article to read up on. It is based on the author's experience with an advertising executive from Madison Avenue and bring to light many interesting points defending SEO and, more importantly, indicating what can be measured to help identify ROI for your online marketing dollars.

The article can be read on the Entireweb website here. It doesn't quite fit our "mandatory reading" list but it's definitely worth the 3 minutes it takes to read whether your an SEO, considering hiring one, or just interested in measuring the ROI on your advertising dollars.

There's a great article that was posted today on ISEDB (Internet Search Engine Database for those of you wondering what the heck ISEDB means). The article, published by Pole Position's Stoney deGeyter covers some interesting points on the recnet sleugh of algorithm changes and, more importantly, what they mean for SEO's, copywriters, and website owners.

The article is entitled, "New Algorithm Measures Require New Means For Optimization" and it is quite good. I've references Stoney on this blog for helping develop a very neat tool for monitoring website. You can find more information on this SEO tool here.

Today's credit however is not about a cool SEO tool, it's about a very good article that fits our recommended reading list. You can find this article on the ISEDB website here.

If yo9u find this article interesting and helpful you may also want to read:

• SEO For The New Google by Dave Davies, and
• SEO For The Big Three by Dave Davies
  

This SEO blog post will focus more on a thanks than news though if you're in need of a website designer who definitely knows their stuff then read on as my recommendations at the end of this post will be extremely helpful in that you'll get to avoid so serious issues.

To begin with, we at Beanstalk would like to pass our thanks to W3 EDGE Web Design out of Boston for work above-and-beyond the call of duty for both Beanstalk and for the mutual clients we share with W3. Over the past months they have impressed us with the following:

• Excellent design. W3 EDGE redesigned the Beanstalk site. Unfortunately, the cobler has no shoes and we have not yet been able to afford the time to fully convert our site to the new design howevever the site is extremely clean, professional and conveys exactly what we want to our visitors. Finger's cross it will be launching early next week.
• Excellent support. The team over at W3 EDGE have provided for our clients and theirs an extraordinary level of support, answering questions well and providing detailed instructions and telephone support helping our clients get what they need quickly and efficiently.
• Excellent team. Normally I recommend that each business stick to their strengths. It's why we at Beanstalk don't offer web design. We're excellent at SEO and so that's what we do. Well the team at W3 can't afford that same luxury with requests for large scale website design, CMS systems, software development, etc. all coming to them as part of a single project. Without exception they have provided top-level service and product delivery in everything from database and CMS development to search engine friendly, W3c-compliant web design.
• Excellent pricing. Like Beanstalk, they're not the cheapest firm on the block but as too many of us have had to find out the hard way, you get what you pay for. They may not be the cheapest designers on the planet but from a cost vs. deliverables perspective they are without a doubt the best value we have found. And thus we've had them do our site and a new site for Total Optimizer Pro (now owned by Beanstalk) which is just being completed on our end and will be launching in the next couple days.

And so once more I'll say, thank you to W3 EDGE Web Design. It's a pleasure to work with a company that knows what they're doing and delivers what they say. Without question, they are one of the leaders in their craft and have provided great service to us and our clients.

The promised recommendation: if you're in need of business web design, development or just consulting contact W3 EDGE. You won't be disappointed. I don't normally make recommendations such as this on the Beanstalk blog however when one is given excellent service, it should be rewarded and for some odd reason web designers aren't in a craft that receives tips. :) To help you find the information you need easily, here is a list of their key pages:

• business web design
• contact information
• cms software (information coming soon)
  
• portfolio

It's pretty much a given, what Microsoft strives to be in the OS arena Google strives to be on the 'Net ... everything.

From a recent discovery by ZDNet's Garett Rogers posted on their Google blog Garett reveals his discovery that hidden in the GMail code is the following line:

function vJ(){if(uy){;return''+"Manage this domain"+" | "}else{return""}}

The key peice in here that gives us a glimpse of what's to come is the "Manage this domain". What this indicates, according to Garett and certainly a reasonable assumption, is that Google is in the process of developing their own mail servers allowing people to set mail.google.com as thei mail server and have the main for their domain (beanstalk-inc.com for example) routed through the Google mail servers.

Taking this one step further and based in part on the launch of Google Web Page Creator last week and building on the launch of Google Analytics (for free) it appears that the fine folks at Google are preparing to not just index the Internet, they want to control it by monitoring how people use your site (Google Analytics), control how you design and host your site (Google Web Page Creator) and now, control how you communicate over the Internet with others.

So what's next for Google? If it's up to Sergey it would be an elevator to the moon (seriously) but more likely ... a full scale hosting service, probably free provided that you show these little ads on your pages. And then? Well, all that's left after total domination of the Internet would be that elevator plan. :)

For more reading on what Google's up to the ZDnet Google Blog is definitely one for your "Favorites".