Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

The most recent article by Beanstalk was published today. Titled "Building Link Bait" it outlines the steps to creating effective link bait for your site (as well as describing what link bait is and why it's important as part of a large link building strategy).

We are sure to write more on this topic as this article is meant to give an overview of it and some tips on how to get started. So keep watching our SEO articles and blog for more information on this and other SEO topics.

You can read the article in our archives at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/links/link-bait.htm.

Labels: link bait, seo article, sitepronews

I had to borrow this line from Mr. Stephen Colbert as there's just so much truthiness in the subject at hand.

I read an article on the SiteProNews.com site today and, while I'd heard the story before, it wasn't any better when it was "put to print". Jim Hedger wrote about the ordeal of Kathy Sierra, well known blogger, speaker and publisher who has had to cancel numerous speaking engagements due to the stupid, sexist and cruel actions of a few who Ms. Sierra was good enough to name.

The names will follow below but first let's get to the wrong. I won't bother getting into detail about the disgusting nature of some of the posts against here. She lists off many of them and gives a detailed account of the "event" on her blog under the post, "Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)". It's a long post but worth the attention of blogger and web publishers everywhere. It is NOT OK to threaten.

And who are the culprits? Who would put out death threats and sexual assauly insinuations? None other than:

• Listics' Frank Paynter
  
• prominent marketing blogger Jeneane Sessum
  
• Raving Lunacy Allen Herrel (aka Head Lemur), and
• Chris Locke (aka Rageboy)
  

Our sympathies go out to Kathy. We hope you'll feel safe. The loss of your voice at these events would be a loss to the industry.

And so, to get back to the title, a Tip of the Hat to Kathy for having the strength to endure and blogger like Jim for getting the message out. And the Wag of the Finger? I think you can guess who that's for. And truthiness? It's just that feeling in your gut to know what's right and what's wrong. Apparently truthiness is absent in some.

Labels: freedom of speech, Kathy Sierra, truthiness

Well it's Friday. A glorious day indeed for those who get weekends off. ;) For those who get to enjoy the next couple days of R&R and for those of us who don't and just might need something to melt our brains with for a few minutes we provide this Friday's post, a look at a man who can move mountains.

OK, so maybe not mountains but he is moving rocks the size of those at Stonehenge with nothing more than himself, gravity and some great ingenuity. His tools? Well you'll have to watch for yourself but it's nothing that didn't exist back then.

Labels: friday fun, stonehenge

Today we launched my personal favorite of our recent tools and that is a keyword density and Google rank checking tool. Enter any page into the form and we'll crawl the page, retrieve the most common terms in one, two, and three keyword strings and provide for you the densities of all the terms in the list.

After that we'll let you select which terms you're most interested in with checkboxes or you can use a search box to speed things up and we'll provide your rankings on Google for all the phrases you're interested in. It's a great tool and definitely one worth adding to your favorites.

Tip: this isn't just useful to check your own site. Enter your competitors' pages and find out what they're targeting and how they're ranking.

You'll find this new tool here and the rest of our tools (now 11 and counting) on our free SEO tools page.

Labels: free seo tools, google rank checking, keyword density

Here we go again, yet another free SEO tool from Beanstalk. Let me know when you're getting tired of them. ;)

The tool launched today allows for a simple comparison of some of the key onsite elements between your page and the pages of your main competitors. It takes a look at titles, meta tags, body text and even shows you the top 2 and 3 word phrases used on each of the sites to give you an idea of what else they may be targeting. You'll find this new tool here.

The tool we'll be launching is one of my favorites of our current offerings though we have some great ideas for future enhancements. So be sure to come back again tomorrow or bookmark our free SEO tools page.

Labels: free seo tools, page comparison

For those of you who visit our blog/site regularly you'll know that we've recently taken to launching free SEO tools for our visitors. Today we are launching two more. These tools are geared towards helping you get a better understanding of how spiders are seeing your site.

The first tool is a site index tools. We'll send out a crawler and report back which pages that page links to, both internally and externally. This allows you to quickly and easily determine how crawlable your links are and where your pages are linking to. You'll find this tool here.

The second free SEO tool we're launching today is a search engine spider test tool. Essentially we'll crawl any given page and report the page back to you as a search engine spider will see it. We'll also give you the keyword denisty of some of the more commonly used terms on your site, your word counts and more. Very handy for making sure the search engines are seeing your site the way you do. You'll find this tool here.

We've got more coming so be sure to visit our blog regularly or bookmark our free SEO tools page.

Labels: free seo tools, search engine spider test, site index

Well, after this morning's little rant about Matthew Rankin I thought it might be nice to speard some good cheer. And so we launched another tool. :)

The tool launched today it the first in our onsite SEO section and is a Search Engine Saturation Tool. Basically it provides the details on how many pages you and your competitors have indexed on the major engines. As you likely know, the more pages you have indexed the strong your site will appear to the search engines. There's also a handy by-product and that is that the more pages you have the more phrases you're likely to rank for.

You'll find this new tool on our site here and all our SEO tools on our free SEO tools page.

Labels: free seo tools, search engine saturation

It's not too often I use our blog as a public whipping post but today is such a day. And today's target, Webmaster and owner of PPC engine SearchPronto.com (URL purposly not hyperlinked for obvious reasons) Matthew Rankin.

Now, why would I come out and name a person and a site that are ticking me off? Because he's stealing from us, that's why. Basically since the time we first started publishing articles and I've been tracking where they're being picked up I've seen the name Matthew Rankin noted as the writer of our works. Today I again came across an article titled, "Choosing Effective Keywords" and when I visited it I found that it was exactly the same as the first of our 10-part SEO series "Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website: Step One – Choosing The Right Keywords".

I've emailed the publishers in the past and many have changed the reference or removed the article(s) however it's just become too big a job to keep up with. I'm sure he's stolen from others too. I can't be that special. ;)

So Matthew Rankin: you've managed to tick me off and get yourself a special, personal mention in our blog. Unfortunately it's more in line with Steve Wilson than Jim Hedger.

Labels: copyright infringement, keywords, matthew rankin

It's always nice to be recognized when you put in the efforts to provide a great service.

When I received an email this morning notifying me that Beanstalk won PromotionWorld's top 10 link popularity services for 2006 I was obviously quite pleased. I knew that our services worked of course. We use them to guarantee our SEO services so there was no doubt in my mind that they were effective. Nonetheless, to have a company as reputable as PromotionWorld independantly rank us among the top 10 was obviously a pleasant surprise.

A big thanks go out from Beanstalk to PromotionWorld for this and the past awards we have received. And thanks also to our link building team. You do a great job and Beanstalk wouldn't be the company it is without you all.

For more information on our link popularity services please visit our link popularity services page.

Labels: link building, link popularity services, promotionworld

Beanstalk today launched the 6th in an ongoing series of free SEO tools they are providing for do-it-yourselfers and SEO's.

The tool launched earlier today allows webmasters to compare their backlinks with those of their main competitors. We of course must remind you that quality counts more than quantity. That's why we also provide easy links from the comparison charts (they open in a new window) so you can look at the links themselves, check their anchor text and the quality/relevancy of the sites they're coming from.

You can find the new tool here and the rest of them (including descriptions of upcoming tools) on our free SEO tools page.

Labels: backlink comparison, free seo tools

Beanstalk today launched it's fifth tool in an ongoing series of free SEO tools we're providing to help you make the most of your online marketing experience. The tool, launched about 5 minutes ago, allows you to check your rankings on Google based on advanced functions such as last modified date, language, which Google you'd like to check and more.

Keep watching either our blog or our free SEO tools page to keep informed on further tool launches. This is a handy one but there are even better ones coming up (in my humble opinion).

You'll find this new tool on the Beanstalk site here and all our free SEO tools here.

Labels: advanced rank checking, free seo tools

As promised, we've launched another tool. This one help you to determine which keywords you should be targeting by providing the estimated searches per day each phrase is expected to receive on the major search engines.

Now this may seem fairly typical, a lot like Overture in fact, however we're supplementing that information with a breakdown by engine and tons of useful related links including links to the trend history for your phrase and links to major bookmarking, blogging, and shopping sites. Basically, we're looking to provide a full picture of what the landscape is for your phrases so you can maximize your promotion. We hope we've succeeded.

You'll find this new tool here and if you missed our last post you'll find all our free SEO tools here.

Labels: free seo tools, keyword activity tool, keyword suggestion

Today Beanstalk launched the third in what will be an ever-growing set of free SEO tools. The first two tools, announced last Thursday in this blog, focused on various ways to check your rankings faster and easier. Today's tool is designed to help you find relevant links faster and easier. This tool enables users to specify the relevancy by search phrase and the type via a drop-down box (article links, blogs, reciprocal, directories, etc.) We hope that you find this tool useful.

Remember to check back regularly as we'll continue to add more useful tools to our lists.

You'll find this new link suggestion tool here.

Labels: free seo tools, link building

Beanstalk today launched the second tool in what will be an ongoing series of free SEO tools built for the SEO community and do-it-yourselfer's.

Yesterday we launched a tool that facilitates checking the rankings of multiple domains for a phrase. You'll find that tool here.

Today we lanuched an even more useful tool. The tool launched today allows website owners to check their rankings for multiple phrases at once. This tools stands to save website owners time each month by allowing them to run a single query rather than searching over and over again and root through sometimes pages of results to find where they rank for their targeted phrases.

You'll find this new tool here.

You'll also want to keep an eye (bookmarking recommended - especially if you use Google Bookmarks) our Free SEO Tools page. We'll be launching many more useful tools over the next couple weeks and plan to continue developing more tools and improving those we've already launched.

Labels: free seo tools, rank checker