Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Beanstalk CEO Dave Davies will be heading to San Jose from August 7th until the 10th for the Search Engine Strategies 2006 Conference. The largest conference of it's kind (i.e. SEO and Internet Marketing-related) it promises to be an excellent event for all who attend.

Dave will be speaking beside Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com on how to rank a website highly on all three major search engines (and who doesn't' want to do that). He will also be covering a bit on how to analyze your statistics to know when it's best to sacrifice rankings on one engine in exchange for increased rankings on another.

It is a pleasure to be offered the chance to speak at this event and our thanks go out to SearchEngineWatch.com editor and SES organizer Danny Sullivan for providing us the chance to do so.

For more information on SES San Jose you can visit their website at http://www.jupiterevents.com/sew/summer06/. For more information on the topic or how to rank highly across all three major engines you should read a 4-part article series put out by Dave Davies and which can be found on the Beanstalk site at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/big-3-series.htm.

Well apparently "shortly" to the fine folks at Telus means 3 hours. While this certainly applies in some cases, when I contact the company responsible for keeping my telephone service operational to inform them that it is in fact not (and knowing that it's basically a few keystrokes to get it functioning again) I expect that "shortly" means "within an hour at most".

Oh well, they have our business for about 10 more days and this delay was yet another reminder of how "important" they view something as irrelevant as our primary means of client and potential client communications are.

But in short, our telephone line is once again available. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience in contacting us today.

Beanstalk's telephone lines are currently unavailable due to a ridiculous oversight on the part of the fine folks at Telus (our local telephone company) who felt that cutting off our telephone service a day before moving it to a new location in the same office was a good idea. It will be back online shortly and thanks to their "wisdom" in making this decision (heck, even if it was my home phone I'd be ticked) we'll be switching to Internet telephone services provided by Shaw Cable (our local cable and high speed Internet provider).

So a big thanks to Telus for forcing our hand into switching providers to a cost-saving, better serviced telephone provider.

Our sincere apologies to anyone who has tried to contact us in the past couple hours. Our telephone service will be on again shortly as we wait for the switch to the new provider.

As a note to Telus: once upon a time you had a monopoly, now you do not. You may want to adjust your business practices accordingly.

There is a good article on the ISEDB website by Karon Thackston on trusted copy. It outlines a variety of the less-known aspects of your onsite content (that's right - onsite optimization still counts). While I believe one of the points she makes could use more clarification, the overall advice is excellent.

Rather than send you directly to the article right now wondering what the point I would clarify is, I will provide a link that will open in a new window to the article here and below outline what I believe needs a bit of clarification:

She wrote:
For instance, let's say one keyphrase you're working with in your copy is "flat monitor." I've preached for years that keyphrases work best when all the words remain in their exact order. That is, when you use the entire phrase "flat monitor" as opposed to only using the single words "flat" and "monitor" individually. Matt confirms this by saying relevance and trust might be increased in Google's eyes when the words "flat" and "monitor" are used next to each other.

While this is true it is not license to race out and brutalize all your content to insure that your keywords are crammed together in the order you want them for search queries. There are three points that need to be considered:

1. The content must read properly (and I'm sure Karen would agree whole-heartedly). To insure that your keywords are always placed in the exact order of the search query targeted you likely will end up with poorly read content which may get you traffic but the traffic isn't much good is everyone leaves your site after reading the first couple sentences, and
2. How unnatural will it appear that every instance of your keywords always appear in a specific order? Quite unnatural I would say. As a rule of thumb I we try to insure that about 50% of the keywords are used in the order or close to it of the search query we're targeting, the other 50% we use separated, and
3. Most of us are targeting multiple phrases on a single page (especially the homepage). What is a webmaster to do if they, like Beanstalk, are targeting multiple-related phrases. For example, while we are targeting about a dozen-or-so phrases on our homepage two of the more important ones are "seo service" and "seo firms". If you look at the phrases you'll see that following the advice given would be impossible (at least in any language that I know of).

comScore released their findings on search engine marketshare and not surprisingly, Google came in in the #1 position. There was a bit of bad news for Google however. While in April of 2006 they were positioned to cross the the 50% mark reaching 49.8% of the search marketshare, they fell to 49.1% in May (poor Google). Yahoo! on the otherhand gained a full percentage over April 2006 with a marketshare of 22.9% and MSN fell by 0.1% to 10.6% with a mere 600,820,000 searches being performed on their engine.

The results for the top ten engines are a bit surprising and are as follows:

Google - 49.1% with 2,783,169,000 searches
Yahoo! - 22.9% with 1,298,915,000 searches
MSN - 10.6% with 600,820,000 searches
AOL - 6.4% with 363,431,000 searches
Ask.com - 2.6% with 146,585,000 searches
My Way - 2.3% with 129,270,000 searches
iWon - 0.6% with 32,257,000 searches
Dogpile - 0.5% with 29,416,000 searches
Earthlink - 0.5% with 27,488,000 searches
SBC Yellow Pages - 0.4% with 24,513,000 searches

Will Google ever be beaten?

I received an email from an interesting company today called SEO Dream. They offer information and services to SEO's which provided inside info into the rankings of domains for popular phrases. In their email they write:

Would you like to know by which popular keywords your site is in the Google
Top100 search results? We found 100,000 most popular keywords, sent 100,000 search requests to Google and got fresh information about positions of sites by popular keywords. Now anyone can visit the site http://www.seodream.com/, enter a domain name and find out by which popular keywords this site is in the Google Top100 search results.

Interesting.

Now of course if you make a claim like that I'm going to HAVE to download a report for our site and take a peek at what was found. While that data in the report was not 100% accurate based on what I was currently seeing in the SERP's there are two considerations I was definitely willing to give:

1. There are periodic shifts in the rankings and a time delay between when they got their data and when I read the report (i.e. the data may be a few days old), and
2. They may be accessing a different datacenter than I am. There are currently at least 2 different sets of results that are being served by Google and they may be accessing a different server.

All-in-all the report was fairly accurate and gives a glimpse at how well you're doing for the more highly searched phrases. Of course, on the other side of that your site's statistics can often provide a fairly good glimpse as well. :) (provided that you're in the top 20 anyways).

While I definitely won't be giving up traditional ranking analytics tactics (like, say, running a search and seeing where you show up or using a tool like WebPosition Gold) it is interesting to see phrases that you aren't targeting and yet are ranking for that you wouldn't have thought to run a report or search for.

I look forward to seeing what future services they come up with. If you're interested or curious you can visit their site for more details at http://www.seodream.com/.

Difficult is the task of promoting a website and specifically website sales in the offline world. Affiliate marketing companies have long tried to bridge the gap by offering discount codes and the such however it's never worked out well with low conversions and disgruntled affiliates who aren't at all confident they're being paid for the traffic they're sending.

A new service being offered by GTP Financial Services Incorporated is the first solid bridge I've encountered and wins my "should have been thought of ages ago but it just never occurred to me" prize. Their "Affiliate Cash Card" provides cards and an infrastructure by which a company can give out a "gift card" either directly or to affiliates which can then be given to potential customers in the "real world" to provide a discount, free month of subscription, etc. Once the code on the card is entered the account is automatically credited and the visitor automatically directed to the desired site/page. For affiliate marketing, the affiliate's account is automatically credited with the signup making this a seamless and trusted solution.

I always enjoy seeing creative solutions to website-related marketing problems and GTP has hit a home run with this one. Congratulations to the GTP team, I'm sure you'll reap some good success from this one.

There's a great article out by veteran SEO Jim Hedger on Bigdaddy, Jagger and the new Google. The article, titled, "Being a Bigdaddy Jagger Meister" illustrates aptly a number of changes over at the Googleplex regarding how search results are generated and covers (winning big points from me) the reasons behind these changes. As I have often touted, knowing what's going on is, if anything, LESS important than knowing why. In this article Jim covers both well.

I found the article on the ISEDB website (a great SEO resource site deserving of being added to your Favorites). You may also want to sign up for their newsletter. You can find the article there at http://isedb.com/db/articles/1463/. Pay close attention and visit our SEO blog later in the week for an article that compliments this one nicely. Later this week we will be publishing our preliminary analysis of Google's purchase of the Orion Algorithm and what this means for SEO's and website owners in regards to the adjustment in tactics that will be required (and a pretty significant adjustment it will be).

Let's begin with the free tool shall we? ClickTracks (award winning and excellent web analytics software) in now offering a free service called ClickTracks Appetizer. The service includes many of the most popular features of the bigger ClickTracks packages but ... it's free. As a teaser they're also turning on all the features of the more robust "ClickTracks Analyzer" for one day each month.

While this is certainly in reaction to Google Analytics coming out free, it's a great reaction and a great piece of software. We at Beanstalk use ClickTracks Pro but of course our needs are far higher than the average user who is only monitoring a single site and who don't need to be able to access it remotely or allow for clients to login to check their stats.

We've given Appetizer a try and it's definitely worth a peek. It will likely be enough for many who just want a bit more detail than the stats provided by their hosting companies and for those who need even more this is a great way to test out ClickTracks, if you can wait for the "free Analyzer" day you'll get to experience all the bells-and-whistles this program has to offer.

More details on the free offering and on ClickTracks in general can be found on the ClickTracks website here.


And while normally our less-SEO related posts are reserved for Fridays one cannot help it when an event such as a birthday falls on a Thursday. And so today's we wish a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Mary, Beanstalk's President. Everyone here wishes you the very best on your day. :)

Today was a day for the geek's history books as Google advances ever-further into the realm of computer domination. Google today launched Google Spreadsheets, a technology based on 2web Technologies system for turning Excel documents into web applications.

Google Spreadsheet is currently in "limited test" mode which means you won't be able to rush out and signup for an account just yet however you can be added to their waiting list and you'll be notified as soon as more accounts are being accepted.

What does this mean?

For the average human being this product will simply provide an alternative to Microsoft Excel. While Excel is an excellent product in it's own right it is overly complicated for many and provides countless features that few people use. Another issue with using Excel is that it cannot be accessed easily by multiple users and worked on without emailing it back and forth whereas this new service from Google will allow multiple users to access and edit the same document in realtime and further allow for different users to be assigned different abilities (i.e. you will be able to set specific users to "read only" mode, etc.)

Now that's how it affects the average person. The biggest affect will likely be felt by none other than one Mr. Bill Gates. This free application (note again the word free) stands to hit below the belt the sales of MS Office to those who don't need a ton of bells-and-whistles but just want to be able to create and edit a spreadsheet for whatever reason. I know from personal experience that very few of us require the super-advanced features of Excel but we still have to pay for them. Now we don't have to pay for any of the features.

There have been many free spreadsheets created including OpenOffice (a very good one as well) but the hurdle they faced was in not being ... well ... Google. As we've clearly seen, simply being Google gets you a ton of test users and even more free publicity (note this blog post as an excellent example). It's definitely theirs to lose. Google Spreadsheet is in a position where many will try it, if they really succeed in producing a solid alternative to Excel when it goes full live to the world at large they may well take a significant bite out of Microsoft's Office sales.

What's in it for Google?

I have heard it asked in regards to this release, "what's in it for Google?" Spreadsheets are not exactly the place where people are likely to click on paid links so serving in ads isn't going to be highly profitable. The service is free and Google doesn't generally charge for services so sales or subscriptions won't be generating revenue. So what's in it for Google?

There are a couple possible answers to this one. One possibility is that they simply want to keep people's eyes on a Google property as much as possible thus creating an environment in which, when people do want to search for something, the likely engine is obvious. Another possibility is that it's not so much about generating revenue but rather reducing the effectiveness of Microsoft to compete with them by cutting into their profitable products. This I would say may not be on the top of their list of reasons but at the very least they much be considering it a very pleasant by-product. And the final reason they could be doing this is the one I personally believe is the root cause and that is to avoid the situation that Microsoft currently finds itself in.

Let's reflect back a few years to a time when Google was just starting up, Microsoft didn't believe that search engines were going to be a main driving force (certainly not worth investing large sums of capital in). Now let's flash forward to the present to a time when Microsoft is scrambling to catch up to Google on the search engine front and Google, because of their enormous influence due to their dominance as a search engine, can now launch products virtually at will and have them used by millions of people. If Google sticks to search engines alone they will remain a power but a topple-able one. Other companies will be able to integrate search into applications (NO WAY ... Bill wouldn't do that right?)and keep users away from Google. BUT, if Google can gain significant ground in other areas and keep peoples' eyes on their properties then other companies will not have the ability to "steal away" users of their search services. This I view as the most likely of their possible reasons for launching free applications as they are beginning to do.

OR maybe they just want to own the world. ;)

Proving once more their superiority and ability to provide excellent beyond the desktop Microsoft's MSN search engine is ... currently down.

If I could send one message over to one Mr. Gates it would be that a service as important to their business model as MSN has become should never EVER be run on a Windows machine. ;) If you want to talk about losing market share to a competitor this is how to do it. Driving your users to a competing website insures that they will have the opporunity to test out the other sites and ... uh oh ... they just might like what they see. Anyone currently trying to run searches on MSN will get an error message, now where do you think they'll go?

Hopefully for their sake they'll have it back up-and-running shortly. Maybe they'll only lose a percentage or two of marketshare.