Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

I've published numerous articles and received feedback that's been both positive and negative as can be expected in this industry but I have to say, I've never had criticism of my work placed on such notable blogs as MarketingPilgrim.com before (Ironically I used Andy from Marketing Pilgrim as an example of a good SEO in the article)

It appears that SEO's are a bit disguntled by my assertion in the article I published yesterday that one of the things you should look for in an SEO is that they be able to rank for their targeted phrases. This doesn't seem to me to be a big leap of logic.

One of the big problems appears to be based on misinterpretation. I'm not sure how or where the critics believe me to be saying that all good SEO's should be able to rank for "seo" or "search engine optimization". I never said that. In fact, what I wrote was:

"... Too often when I take a look at the SEO's website and research their targeted phrases (usually pretty obvious when you look at the title and heading tags) I find that they don't even rank for their own phrases."

What I'm trying to say is that a good SEO should have done their research, figured out how to target their phrases and which they could rank for, and then do that. If you're an SEO focusing on real estate your phrase could well be "seo for real estate agents". The key is that you should be able to do for yourself what's you're claiming you can do for others.

For me to say that a good SEO should be able to rank for one of the two phrases noted above is a bit silly. There are a number of good SEO's out there and only ten spots on the first page of Google. Fortunately there are a good number of phrases available.

I write this as the article is getting picked up on more and more sites now and I really don't want to have to reply to each and every post attacking my stance. I stick by it and if you can't rank your own site for your targeted phrases (WHATEVER THEY MAY BE) then I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Labels: andy beal, marketing pilgrim, seo article, what to look for in an seo

Because we at Beanstalk offer a guarantee to our clients, from time-to-time we have to put a hold on accepting new contracts. During these periods we offer to guide our visitors in the right direction in choosing an SEO firm as we're well aware of how difficult it can be to sort out the good from the bad.

To make our lives easier and to make the lives easier of our valued visitors I've taken the initiative and written an article on just this topic. Now, this doesn't mean you can't contact us if you have questions, just that the basics and some of the most common questions we get asked are now clarified (hopefully) in an article. The article is titled, "What To Look For In An SEO" and can be found in our articles area.

I sincerely hope that this article proves useful to you. If you still have questions, feel free to ask.

Labels: seo article, seo firm

Good news came to Yahoo! and it's advertisers today in the form of a ComScore report. For those of you who read this blog regularly or, to be more accurate, any SEO blog regularly, you'll recall that back on February 5th Yahoo! launched it's new advertising system Panama. As one could expect, the changes have been monitored closely by Yahoo!

ComScore today released their finding on the changes in click through rates on Yahoo! ads. And they are:

• Week Ending 2/11/07 - 5% increase
• Week Ending 2/18/07 - 9% increase
  

Now, these number may not seem impressive, after all - they're only single digit increases however when we consider that we're dealing with over 60 million searches per day in the US alone and that this increase takes them from a 10.1% advertising click through rate to 11.1% this reflects an additional 600,000 advertiser clicks per day. this is 219,000,000 additional click per year which is going to easily translate into many MANY millions of dollars in revenue for Yahoo!

You can read ComScore's full release here.

Labels: comscore, panama, yahoo

As Jim Hedger and I discussed on our weekly radio show on Webmaster Radio today, Abdel Kareem Nabil has just been sentenced to 4 year in prison, 3 of these years are for insulting Islam and inciting sectarian strife and one year for insulting President Mubarak.

As Jim mentioned on the SiteProNews blog, here is what he was charged for:

Nabil wrote about riots in which a Coptic Christian church was attacked by Muslim worshipers over a play deemed offensive to Islam. "Muslims revealed their true ugly face and appeared to all the world that they are full of brutality, barbarism and inhumanity," he wrote, calling Muhammad and his early followers, “spillers of blood” for their teachings on the use of violence.

Now, I'm definitely not going to step in and make this any sort of religious post, we've all been less than perfect at one time or another and there are enough "spillers of blood" to go around BUT what's a key issue here is the man's right to be heard (or read as the case may be).

As we noted on the show, I would call on any and all bloggers to bring this point up and, as Jim asked, to avoid vacations to Egypt until such time as these sorts of things don't occur and there is freedom of speech applied to those who may disagree with the status-quo. Right or wrong, every voice deserves the right to be heard.

Labels: abdel kareem nabil, freedom of speech, jim hedger, sitepronews, webmaster radio

ComScore today released their search engine market share stats for January, 2007. The major engines broke down as follows:

• Google - 47.9% (o.2% increase)
• Yahoo! - 28.1% (0.4% decrease)
• Microsoft - 10.6% (0.1% increase)
• Ask - 5.2% (0.2% decrease)
  

And that's all we've got for today. It's my birthday and so now I'm off for some fun with the kids and some nauseatingly sweet cake. :)

Labels: comscore, market share, predictions 2007 seo search engine

I love RSS and I love the Firefox Extension RSS Ticker. Firefox is an excellent browser and combined, these two make it easy to keep updated on the latest going-on effortlessly by scrolling my favorite RSS feeds across the bottom of my browser window. And that's how I found this latest tid-bit of info on the Marketing Pilgrim blog.

For those who have blogs through Blogger (like this one) and who have converted to the new system recently, take a look at your code. It appears that there are some *minor* issues. Actually, just one but wow - is it a doozy.

Blogger blogs, by default, include the following generic code: <$BlogMetaData$>

Well this doesn't look so bad. It tells Blogger to insert the meta data specified for the site through the Blogger control panel, how helpful. The control panel allows you to set your blog as listed or unlisted. If it's listed then it will be crawlable, if it's unlisted then it will not be. Unfortunately for some unfortunates who have recently switched, this tag is producing the following:

<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">
<meta name="generator" content="Blogger">
<link rel="service.feed" type="application/atom+xml" title="DanoTestMule" href="http://testmule.blogspot.com/atom.xml">
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="DanoTestMule" href="http://www.blogger.com/atom/6602135">
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://www.blogger.com/rsd.pyra?blogID=6602135">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

Hmmm, looks OK, looks OK, WAIT!!! <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"> Huston, we have a problem.

So, if you've recently converted to the new version of Blogger, be sure to check your code. You might find something a bit, well, let's use the word "hindering" shall we?

As an additional note, and on an unrelated topic, please accept my apologies for the lack of posts of late. I've been busy ransacking and preparing to write about Google Personalization which involves tearing through 6 patents (now THAT's fun reading) and then taking the time to understand what they actually mean. SiteProNews editor Jim Hedger and I will be publishing a white paper in the next couple weeks on the subject. I will be posting some patent info in the next couple days on this blog so keep watching.

And to be fair to the source of the Blogger info, here's your link Andy. :)

Labels: blog, blogger, google, jim hedger, nofollow, noindex, personalization, white paper

After yesterday's post on Google launching their personalization feature I received plenty of emails regarding the patents this feature is based on. I will soon be publishing an article covering the subject so I won't fine-tooth the details here (you'll just have to come back regularly for the article :) however I'd like to include a few links you're likely interested in. And they are:

The Patents
These are the patents this new feature is based on

• Systems and methods for analyzing a user's web history
• Systems and methods for modifying search results based on a user's history
• Systems and methods for providing a graphical display of search activity
• Systems and methods for managing multiple user accounts
• Systems and methods for combining sets of favorites
• Systems and methods for providing subscription-based personalization

The Feedback
Here are links to some great articles, blog posts and feedback on the subject (there's a lot more out there than this - I've just picked what I believe to be the best of the info

• Google Ramps Up Personalized Search - Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land.com
  
• Personally speaking - The announcement of the launch of personalization on Google's official blog
• Google's Personalized Results - Jim Hedger on SiteProNews.com (it's on their homepage - I'll try to remember to change the link when it goes to a permanent location)

And just a reminder - keep watching our blog. We'll be posting an announcement of one of the most researched articles I've ever done on what is arguably the biggest change in search in years.

Labels: danny sullivan, google, jim hedger, patents, personalization, sitepronews

Thanks Google - Now I Can See My Backlinks !!!

Only a couple hours later and there's already an update below.

Well today appears to have been an even bigger day than I first thought. First there was the launch of Yahoo!'s Panama and now I'm reading in Google's press center that there are some great enhancements over there too. :)

At 2:44PM Google announced on their blog that they are providing even more information in their Webmaster Tools than previously. We've all done the backlink checks with link:www.domain.com only to be disappointed with the resulting list. Google hasn't shown a full list of backlinks in ages so how were we to know where are backlinks were from and where they were going. Well now we know. :)

In their Webmaster Tools the fine folks at Google are now showing a full list of the backlinks they know about that point to your domain and even better, they list off all the pages in your site so with a simple click of a button you can see the backlinks to any given page. The reason Google stopped showing the backlinks in full was that this list was too easily manipulated by SEO's (those crafty buggers ;) but not knowing the status of one's own site worked against website owners favor. This is a great addition to their tools and wins a BIG THUMBS UP from this SEO. Don't give my backlink data to my competitors, but thanks for letting me see it. :) Oh, but if you like you can give theirs to me. ;)

If you haven't already, create an account at Google's Webmaster Central. You'll be glad you did.

And Now, Personalization ...

And today I had brought to my attention an interesting page on the Google Search Results help area. A big thanks to Jim Hedger (co-host on Webmaster Radio) for pointing this out to me. The post reads:

When you're signed in to Google Accounts, you'll now get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. For example, if you use Google Bookmarks or Google Search History, you'll get more targeted web search results and recommendations for videos or gadgets. You can easily access these recommendations by adding the "Interesting Items" gadget directly to your personalized homepage.

And so the lives of SEO's everywhere gets just a little more complex. Truly personalized results? Now, if you see different results than I do, how exactly is a company like Beanstalk supposed to honor guarantees when what we're seeing may be different?

Alas, that is our problem to sort out and not yours (how happy are you about that?) but one this is sure, with better, more personalized results being fed, users are sure to win and SEO's will need to adapt. As I noted to Jim when he asked how it would affect SEO's, I replied:

"In the long run it will force SEO to do what they SHOULD do. Write compelling content for the target market, push into social media and establish links from industry hubs."

It might take more to rank sites when the exact variables are so specific to the end user however in the end the big winner is the client (oh, and the searcher). It might make my life a bit more difficult but it makes the industry and search engine stronger, and that can only be a good thing. Unless you're concerned about Big Brother. ;)

I refound a blog post from none other than Google patent guru Bill Slawski on the subject of personalization. I love patents as much as the next guy ;) but noone can do their analysis justice like Bill so rather than try in vain to capture what he has to say on the subject I'll just link to his post below. In his work you'll find great analysis and links to a number of related Google patents that will open your eyes as to what this all means. Thanks Bill and keep up the great work.

You'll find Bill Slawski's blog post titled, "Google Personalization Methods" here.

Labels: backlinks, google, personalization, webmaster tools

Well let's begin with today's big news, the launch of the much anticipated Panama. Yahoo! has long (in Internet terms) been behind in the PPC game with both Google and Microsoft leading that way in regards to customization, algorithmic results and GUI. Well today that all changed with the Panama update, Yahoo!'s cry that they're still in the game and take PPC (and the revenue it can generate) seriously.

Let's take a look at the new features as they're outlined on the Yahoo! site shall we?


If we take a peek at all these great new features it quickly becomes apparently that they now look a lot like, well, Google. So, a lot of work, months of waiting and what do we get - a copy of something that's already being done.

Nonetheless this is a great step forward for Yahoo! (at least until Google and Microsoft upgrade their engines and once again move ahead). More importantly, this is a great step forh advertisers who were, until now, frustrated with the differences in capabilities between what they sould do with Ad Words vs. what they could do with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Now just to wait and see how many holes and issues they have ...

Jennifer at Search Engine Guide wrote about this event providing many good links to additional information and insight. You can read Jennifer's article here.

And A Great Link

I like to link. As anyone who's a regular blog visitor will know, I have no problems linking to as many useful articles and resources as I can find and thanks to link guru Andy Hagans I have yet another for you. When interviewing Andy for SitePoint's updated SEM Kit he brought up a great resource for link baiting. The page outlines many of the key factors on building good content that others will want to link to (you may have to read a bit between the lines but it's there). I won't bother outlining it here, I'll just point you in the direction of this short and sweet information. You'll find it here.