Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

An article written by link-guru Andy Hagans came to my attention today. The article is on "link baiting" and it covers some unique methods for attaining links to your website. In the article Andy discusses the Google sandbox (or "Trustbox" as he calls it) and he argues that effective link baiting can help you get through this purgatory faster.

I could go through the article here in this post but rather than do that I'm going to prove Andy's point and link right to his article. One of his points is to get links from blogs and so I'll oblidge by giving one here with the anchor text "link baiting" just for good measure. :)

The article is both humerous and informative and is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in SEO and link building (and if you're not - what are you doing on our blog?). I've even gone so far as to add it to my Bookmarks Toolbar so I can read it again later when I'll have time to focus a bit more.

Well done Andy, you get an A+ for this one. :)

As the new writer for SitePoint's SEM Kit I've been testing out a lot of tools and services I had only peek at previously. While I'm not a HUGE fan of tools that provide feedback regarding what you should do, the service offered by Bruce Clay seemed an interesting one (generally I stick to tools that give the data and based the "what to do" on research and an understanding of what the search engines are looking for and what they want to accomplish).

As none of the tactics noted involve spam in any minor degree I decided to put it to the test with a site I know better than any other. And so we've applied changes to the Beanstalk homepage and some aspects of its structure to see what happens. While there are a couple portions that will likely be changing back regardless of the effect (the much longer title now for example: our old title was "Guaranteed SEO Services by Beanstalk") I thought that it would be interesting to see what happens.

I don't recommend this for everyone (testing on an important and live site) however with a hold currently on new clients, a temporary drop of a position or two (the likely worst case scenario) is certainly tolerable.

And so check back our valued readers, I will be sure to let you know how it goes once these changes get picked up and some affects are realized.

As a note: they did recommend to reduce the anchor text on our homepage. This would require adjusting our entire navigation system and making the site less user friendly and thus we didn't take them up on the recommendation. That said, if the site does in fact increase in rankings we'll definitely have to rethink that stance. ;)

Check back in a couple week and we'll be sure to let you know what the preliminary results are.

There's currently an article posted on the SearchEngineWatch.com website titled, "Do Patents Point to SEO Gold?" The article, written by Shari Thorow, discussed whether studying the patents, whitepapers, etc. put out by search engine staff are guidelines for SEO or whether they will send those looking to use them to attain higher rankings in the wrong direction.

For those of you who are regular visitors to the Beanstalk blog you'll know that we're big fans of monitoring patents, studying them, memorizing them, and applying the lessons from them into our SEO strategies. For information on some of the more important patent applications we've used to adjust our strategies (guaranteed remember so we don't just throw in anything we hear but rather only those that we know will work well) you can visit our blog posts on the patents for the Google Sandbox and editorial input.

The article gives a solid view of the pros and cons of monitoring the patents and discusses what SEO's need to consider when doing so. The patent applications are not a blueprint, they cover much of what will never be done but if we understand the nature of a patent we understand what is important about such a thing being filed by a search engine. The purpose of a patent is to stop others from developing the same technology. This means that they view this specific technology so worthwhile that they don't want others to use it.

If a technology is this valuable they are sure to integrate it in some form or another. To be sure, patents and the strict rules they indicate are not the end-all-be-all. Many functions are never introduced and others are altered before they are launched however as we discussed back in our article titled "Anatomy Of An Internet Search Engine" understanding how a search engine functions and what the end goal of the engine is gives optimizers a distinct advantage in rankings sites highly, not just today - but down the road as well by following the best practices of the current algorithms and the ones we know are coming.

The article on the SearchEngineWatch website is recommended reading for anyone who does or is interested in reading the various patents put out by the search engines and their staff. Knowing how to read them is almost as important as what they contain and Shari does a good job of outlining this. You can find the article on the SEW site here.

Two days ago we brought you information on an interview with Google guru Matt Cutts in which he described a fairly new black hat tactic. In this interview he pointed to OneupWeb as a company that used the technology and got their clients into major trouble. Visit our blog post from September 19th for more on that topic. The next day we brought you information from Jim Hedger of SiteProNews on a pretty major issue. He received a call from the CEO of OneupWeb. They claimed that not only didn't they but they don't host their clients so they couldn't have. Was Matt misinformed? Could even one of Google's best be ... cough cough ... wrong? Read our post from September 20th for more on this.

Well now we have a response back from Matt himself on the issue. As it turns out, well, indeed one of Google's best can be wrong. Here is what he said to Jim Hedger:

In this case, the simplest explanation is the right one: I made a mistake. I meant to say iPowerWeb, and I said Oneupweb by accident. I felt bad enough about the mistake that I posted a clarification on my blog at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/goodkarma-radio-show-and-a-clarification/

My apologies to Lisa Wehr and the folks at Oneupweb, who responded to my error with grace and humor.

So there we have it. OneupWeb is vindicated.

There are some other great comment from Matt on the SiteProNews blog. You can visit Jim's post from today to find out more.

As promised yesterday in our post on an interview with Matt Cutts and his naming of a specific SEO firm (OneupWeb) and their alleged use of black hat tactics that could seriously damage their client's domains, we have a followup.

In yesterdays post I mentioned that a conversation with SiteProNews editor Jim Hedger revealed that their may be more to the story than meets the eye. In todays blog post he revealed what that something was. He chronicles a discussion he had with Lisa Wehr, CEO of OneupWeb, and PR Director, Rachel North. They defend their innocence as a company and bring up some decent point that, if true, would basically make it impossible for the allegation to be true.

Rather than retype the entire post by Jim I'll simply recommend you read it here.

There was an interesting post on the SiteProNews blog today by editor Jim Hedger. The post chronicles an interview between Google Software Engineer Matt Cutts (see our post from just a few hours ago) and Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools.

In the interview Matt discusses a new method that black hatters have at their disposal (or at least, did until very recently). This method uses a CGI script to determine who is entering the site (human or Googlebot) and if it's Google, displays links to a specified domain (in the example used it was a series of adult sites).

In a chat just moments ago with Jim he indicated that perhaps there was more to the story regarding the SEO firm named in the interview. I couldn't get too many details out of him but there will be more to the story coming soon on the SiteProNews blog.

You can view the thread we are discussing in this post here. To keep updated on what Jim has discovered you can visit the SiteProNews blog or visit us here again soon. As soon as we hear work that the next post is ready and the news is out you can be sure we'll make mention of it. :)

In my general travels around the net (the only travelling I get to do at light speed :) I found a great blog post on the SEOEgghead.com website. In their post they highlight some of the best specific tips that Google Software Engineer Matt Cutts has given to the SEO and webmaster communities.

The post includes the answrs to such questions as:

• Is it better to use underscores of dashes in URLs?
• What is the best practice if your site is built in Flash and you want to rank highly?
• How many parameters can a URL have and get indexed properly?
• What is the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect?
• and much more.

A grea post with useful information. Even if you read Matt's blog (recommended) and know this stuff already it's great to have it all in one place. You'll find this post on the SEOEgghead.com website here.

We operate a small Internet directory at www.far-sited.net. It's a generally ignored directory at this point but a few years ago I thought it would be fun to start as practice. If nothing else doing so gave me a great respect for directory owners/editors and the amount of work they put in.

One day my son wanted to put some pictures of Pokemon on the Internet for his friends. I created a folder called "pokemon" on the site, built a simple template with him, showed him how to add pictures and let him go. That was about 5 or 6 months ago.

As noted, the site is not a big priority here and I haven't really looked at it since. Well I decided to pop in and check my stats a couple days ago just out of curiosity and lo-and-behold about 80% of all the traffic the site was getting was for ... pokemon related phrases !

So we've just gone through again, added some AdSense ads onto the pages in a profile just for him in my account (heck, it's his pages so if he can make a few buck on it it will definitely provide a good lesson that ... well ... SEO pays :)

The area of the directory is called Pokemon Masters (which he truly is). As if there's any question (which I'm sure there isn't ;) I know virtually nothing about Pokemon but if I have to pick (which I've had to) then Pikachu is my favorite. :)

The link finding tool of choice for those of us at Beanstalk has just been updated. The tool is PR Prowler and it significantly increases the speed with which quality, relevant links can be found and secured to a site regardless of whether those links are reciprocal or non-reciprocal and what method of non-recip link building you might undertake.

The new features that have been added to this tool are:

1. SERP # added to results (shows position on Google)
2. Domain Age for all results added (unique to PRP!)
3. Query limit feature upgraded
4. Email feature upgraded, now you can select which link partners to email to
5. Speed - now it runs much faster too!
   

Well done Shawn, you've managed to make one of Beanstalk's "tools we use" even better. :)

The product is only $97 (how they came up with that figure I have no idea) and pays for itself just in time spent on the first run. If you'd like more inforamtion on this product you can visit the PR Prowler website by clicking here.

Today we received a FedEx over here at Beanstalk that definitely caught our attention. In it was the document below.

In my travels I stumbled on an interesting chart which reveals the general click through rate to a site based on their specific position in the search engine results. We all know that a site in position 1 is going to see higher traffic than a site in position two - but how much? There have been a few reports done up on this subject, some from EyeTracker, and other various sources however today I discovered one put out by the folks at SEO-Blog.com which is based on AOL's own data.

Now , before we go launching over to their stats it's important to remember the famous quote popularized by Samuel Clemens (you might know him better as Mark Twain). "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

No matter how accurate statistics are they can be misread or misused. This information relates to AOL users and while one can render some assumptions about overall user traffic we have to remember that the site layout, placement of the PPC ads, etc. on the AOL site are different than those on the other major engines and thus, the traffic patterns are going to be different.

The chart they created based on the Click Through statistics:

As you can clearly see, the traffic drops off significantly after position one HOWEVER, I believe we noted that one has to take all the factors into account. Not coincidentally, when we take into account the pages that appear when we change our resolution to 800x600 we'll note that it's only the paid ads and the first organic listing that are "above the fold".

Let's compare the graph above with the EyeTracker studies done on Google results that we discussed back on April 18th. It showed the following:


Here we can see that the top three sites (when they appear above the fold) will all receive eyeballs which means that all of them have the opportunity to get the click.

On the other side of the coin, 36% of searchers assume that a site that appears higher in the rankings is a leader in their field and thus people ranked higher are likely to get more clicks simply based on this perception.

So, now that you're likely thoroughly confused but perhaps better informed regarding what these statistics mean (or perhaps, don't mean) you can use them to help you understand a bit more about your site traffic when you analyze the traffic and relate it to your search engine positions.

As a further note of confusion, these stats vary by field. For example, in the SEO industry the need to be ranked higher on the page is MUCH higher. Many of you will have gotten to this blog by typing in "seo blog" or "seo news". It's likely that you're looking for SEO advice from people who can rank themselves highly and so you're less likely than normal to travel further done the page and highly unlikely to go to page two (statistically speaking though I can already see you prepping to hit the "Back" button and go check out page 2 of the results. ;)

The Search Results vs Click Through chart above was found on the SEO-Book.com site at http://www.seo-blog.com/serps-position-and-clickthroughs.php. (it's only fair to give them a link and proper credit I'd say). You'll also find another interesting chart (same data, different perspective) and some other notes about it that you may find interesting.

As has happened previously, Beanstalk is putting a hold on accepting new clients. We do this occasionally when our client load hits a point where we feel that to provide the level of service our clients have come to expect from us we need to put a hold on accepting new contracts.

This hold does not include our "affordable" set of SEO services as well as as consulting, training and a few other assorted services. For information on these services you can visit http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/services/. These services are provided in such a manner as to not affect our current clients and the information provided is the same we would use were we to perform the SEO ourselves so you can rest assured that you are receiving the highest level of information that we can provide.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this hold may cause. Unfortunately we have no end date scheduled for this hold. You are welcome to contact us to be put on a notification list or visit our blog regularly where we will post a change in this position.

Thank you to all our visitors and to our clients for putting us in this position. :)

Labels: beanstalk, seo services

Alright, the title may be a bit misleading but it's still a good title. :)

For the month of August Beanstalk has made the SEO Consultants Directory's top 10 most viewed profiles.

Thanks to all of you who may have taken a peek at our profile and hey, if all out blog readers go there this month maybe we can get higher than #9 next month. To visit our profile and help us climb that top 10 list (note: not as important as the Google top 10 list ;) you can do so at http://www.seoconsultants.com/profile/2708/.

Thanks !!!

As it's a Friday I thought I'd leave you with something on the lighter side to take you into the weekend. First, a "quote of the day" brought to me by Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design who mentioned in an MSN chat, "the good news is the best business is done with your back against the wall." A very good quote and too often true.

The humor of the day is brought to us by one Mr. Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report. As I sit an eat lunch I'll often paroose Spiked Humor for some interesting tid-bits of useless entertainment. Having chuckled at The Colbert Report last night I decided to search for some clips by him and low-and-behold there were many. I've posted a clip by Colbert in the past from back when he was with The Daily Show. He did a great piece on blogging and bloggers. Well in this clip he takes a shot at Wikipedia (note: even in my "useless entertainment mode" I'm a geek :) When you've got 4 minutes and 15 seconds to kill (might I suggest during lunch) it should add a few chuckles to your day. You can view the clip on the Spiked Humor website here.

And now for Google. To keep things light, even on this front, today we will be taking a peek at perhaps one of the most ludicrous lawsuits launched against Google. There's a full article on the lawsuit written by Jennifer Laycock on the Search Engine Guide website. To summarize it, Theresa B. Bradley from BRAVA Corp is suing Google because she acted stupidly. If only that's the way it really worked Darwin's theories who be shot to heck. ;) You can read the article and find more links to the full details on the Search Engine Guide website here.

Now go and have a good weekend. :)