Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

The first thing we should note is the exciting news (to us geeks anyways) that today the fine folks at Mozilla are popping the corks on some Champaign and celebrating the 200 millionth download of the Firefox browser.

We at Beanstalk have long since touted the superiority of this browser over other's on the market. It's open-source nature has allowed for a number of excellent extension to be developed for it allowing users to instantly access a wide range of features/information including a number of useful SEO tools, instant weather reports, and a whole lot more. I couldn't possibly list off all the extension here. If you're interested in seeing what else this browser can do for you, you can visit the Firefox Extensions area of the Mozilla site at https://addons.mozilla.org/?application=Firefox.

Now, with heartfelt congratulations now passed on to the Mozilla folks, let's move of to another related topic and that's the publication of a useful article I found today on the Site-Reference site by Adam McFarland, owner of iPrioritize. The article describes and provides links to 13 other useful Firefox Extensions including a couple I wasn't already using (thanks Adam).

You can read the article on the Site-Reference site here.

For those of you who may not be regular Beanstalk blog readers here are some additional links to past blog posts on Firefox including links to other useful extensions not listed in the article:

• April 6, 2005 - Firefox Extensions
• April 7, 2005 - Google and Firefox sittin' in a tree ...
• May 31, 2005 - David Beating Goliath
  
• June 9, 2005 - Yet Another Cool Tool For Firefox
  
• June 10, 2005 - Beanstalk Joins The Firefox Army
• June 13, 2005 - Microsoft Catching Up But Not On
  
• July 7, 2005 - Today BETA Version Of Google Toolbar
  
• October 31, 2005 - Gotta Love Firefox Developers :)
  
• December 15, 2005 - Google Extends Firefox
• March 14, 2006 - Stumbling On Great Sites
  

A few months ago Beanstalk published a couple articles on SEO competition analysis. In these articles we covered both the onsite and offsite considerations that a webmaster or SEO must make and provided information on the tools you can use to help speed up the process.

A recent article on the ISEDB website provides further discussion on this very important topic and makes our "recommended reading" list. The article titled, "Demystifying Your Competitor's Ranking Successes" was written by veteran SEO Ross Dunn. The article covers the onsite and offiste factors and includes links to some useful tools as well.

You can read the article in it's full glory on the ISEDB website at http://isedb.com/db/articles/1492/.

Beanstalk's most recent article was published today titles, "Google, Orion, SEO & You". The article discusses the purchase of the Orion Algorithm by Google and the ramifications that this technology will have ont the way search engines are used and the way SEO and website promotions will need to be addressed.

As there is much discussion about this purchase and many different opinions regarding how this technology will be implemented, the article includes our conclusions as well as providing other's opinions and links to additional information on this important purchase.

You can read the article on the Beanstalk website here.

Well, as if controlling what's you see on the Internet wasn't enough Google is now working to control how you eat. With numerous launches of new products it was only a matter of time until they found a way to tie into not just our hearts, but also our stomachs.

Google Fridge is just this step. And how much for this new item that both cools and heats food? A mere $179.50 (plus $18 shipping).

So what's the catch?

Well, the catch is that it was a one-off on eBay and unfortunately for us and our location up here in the Great White North (thus running searches with the criteria "Available To Canada") we missed it (I personally would have paid more than $180 for this one). You can check out one of Google's fridges on the eBay website here.

If nothing else you'll get a glimpse of what the staff of Google get as a perk beside their desks (of course when I type "perk" what I mean is "a cheap way to keep you at their desks rather than wasting time traveling to the cafeteria ;).

There's a great article on the ISEDB website by Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE on SEO and semantics. The article covers the importance of understanding semantics for SEO's and those wishing to not just rank highly but to maintain those rankings.

An important point not missed on Frederick was the significance of where the search engines are headed, not jsut where they are. In the article Mr. Townes notes the long tems goals/purpose of the search engines and the importance that proper semantics play in how their algorithms do and increasing will play in how websites rank.

You can read the full article on the ISEDB website at http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1491/.

As those of you who visit here often will know, Beanstalk's Dave Davies will be speaking at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose on August 8th. He will be speaking with SEO's Aaron Wall (SEOBook.com) and Mike Murray (FathomSEO.com) about ranking highly on the big three search engines, whether it's actually possible and how to decide when it's not worth it.

We have now set up a resource section on our site for this and future Strategies Conferences at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/ses/. This page will be filled with information pertaining to our session and additional information from the conference as it approaches.

I found on the SiteProNews website an interesting read published by Apollo Hosting's Eric Lester. The article chronicles the latest issues encountered over at the Googleplex regarding a single individual and his ability to add billions of pages into Google's index in a matter of weeks, many of which ranked well (and no, the article doesn't outline how to do it). ;)

Ironically, the revenue being generated for this individual came from ... you guessed it ... AdSense.

You can read the article on the SiteProNews homepage at http://www.sitepronews.com/.

Today Beanstalk CEO Dave Davies published an article on de-optimization. The article covers how to remove the tell-tale signs of SEO from your site while maintaining and even improving our your search engine rankings.

The article can be found on the Beanstalk website here.

There are MANY online tools for automatically creating a Google sitemap. Some are good, some are ... well ... not so good. Generally the biggest frustration with many of these free tools (and I try to remember the cost before I complain) is the number of pages and the depth of the pages it will include.

For those who may not be interested in installing scripts, etc. there's a handy sitemap generator that's free as long as you're site is less than 500 pages. You can set the default change frequency and priority however you'll have to go in manually after-the-fact and update the values as appropriate. For instance, not every page on your site should be set at a priority of 1.0. You may love your site but there are apges that are higher in priority than others. To use the Beanstalk site as an example, the only pages on the site with a 1.0 priority are the homepage, our blog homepage, our guarantee page, and our main services page. The rest of the pages fall between 0.1 and 0.9 (of course). Similarly, not every page changes with the same frequency. Our blog and homepage are set at a change freqency of "daily" whereas the majority of other pages are set at either monthly or yearly as they change far less often.

I only mention these things to point out that simply running the generator and posting the results isn't enough. You'll actually have to go into it and adjust some of the values. You can find this generator at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Once the map is made you can visit the Google Sitemaps page and submit it. You'll be insured that all the pages of your site are found and they also provide some interesting stats too if you verify your site.