Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

The Mozilla Corporation CEO has announced on her BLOG that Mozilla Thunderbird will be split into a "new, separate organizational setting". The details of which have not been decided on yet, although she has outlined three different options. One thing is a fact strategically this bodes well for both Firefox and Thunderbird projects.

Given the June 2007 browser statistics (thecounter.com) Internet Explorer 6 is at 54%, IE7 is at 16%, Firefox is 12% (28% usage in Europe!), Netscape is at 11% (based on Firefox), and Safari is at 3%. Given the statistics above the only real targets for Firefox to grow in market share are to take away from IE6, and IE7 user base. By being able to forget about Thunderbird and concentrate on Firefox it should be easy for them to achieve at least a 30% global usage.

The Windows browser wars have heated up again, with the entry of Safari into the browser market, which is currently available as a public beta. This gives Mozilla another contender to worry about. This Apple release actually caught me totally off guard, for a while I pondered why Apple would release Safari for Windows, as they have little chance of any real chance of denting Firefox or Internet Explorer usage. But after the first Safari updater window opened I understood, they wanted to trick me into installing iTunes and Quicktime. But I’ll definitely be keeping it installed for cross browser capability web page testing.

Maybe if we are lucky this new Thunderbird foundation just maybe fix the bug with the new message indicator constantly displaying when no new messages have arrived (clicking on the drafts folder makes it disappear). They could also seriously compete with Outlook if they came out with a central mailbox system, adding shared contacts, and listening to the business user feedback. I’ll definitely be watching both projects for the ramifications.

As a side note don’t forget today is System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Labels: firefox, mozilla, thunderbird

I sat at roughly 8:30PM on a Wednesday night working on a client proposal and I decided to open up Internet Explorer. Now, this is a rarity for me being the Firefox enthusiast than I am and I'm honestly not sure what prompted me to do so this time. So rarely does this event happen that the default homepage is still set to MSN. Upon it's launched I was greeted by the standard page of various news stories, etc. And I'm glad I did.

A headline in the news caught my attention, "He Only Saved A Billion People". I decided to follow the link and see what they were referring to. As it turns out, Jonathan Alter (the reporter) was referring to Norman Borlaug. Norman who? That's exactly the question I asked.

As it turns out, Mr. Borlaug - a 93 year old agronomist (they deal with the science of agriculture) was just awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Well good for him I suppose but that's last week's news (literally). What else has he done?

On top of that he's won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. OK OK, I'm a little bit impressed I suppose but come on, why should this guy get a blog post here when I haven't even bothered to write one about Brad Pitt, or Paris Hilton - I mean, they're famous too. Oh wait, Borlaug isn't famous. Well, Brad and Paris are stars that we all know so Borlaug couldn't have done too much that's for sure. We'll, there's this one little thing - he is credited with saving a billion people.

That's right, this person whom I'm writing about, who I only found out about by accident when I landed on MSN, is credited with saving over one billion people worldwide. Now, I can't get into all the details here however I do know where you can find them, the link will come in a little bit. The point of this blog however is to bring up a very interesting question (albeit unrelated to SEO). What are we doing? I consider myself to be a fairly educated human being (who doesn't?) and I read a lot (in fact, I read all day at my computer) but it hits me now that the more "connected" I become with the world around me, the more I Facebook, the more I MSN, the more I rely on YouTube and SpikedHumor for my entertainment - the less I know about what's actually going on around me. I get caught up in the great importance of SEO and spend countless hours watching rankings move a position or two and studying what made it happen and then, when it's time for a break, I turn to online games, chats, forums and the like to provide my distractions never pausing to consider that there just might be something in this world outside of my computer.

Now, don't get me wrong; each person has their role and that thing they are best at and that is the task they should do. I'm not about to pack up the family in our mini-van and head for the hills to save whatever might be there - I enjoy SEO and my clients far to much to consider that, however today brought forth a great reminder that sometimes it just might be wise to open the window (goodness the light is sure bright - grrrrr, and it reflects on my monitor) and take a peek around and see what's going on in the real world. Are we becoming too preoccupied with the existence of the artificial world we have created out of 1's and 0's? Are we losing touch with what's really important? Why do I know the private lives of celebrities but I don't know the name of an extremely influential scientist who's saved a billion people? Perhaps it is time that we set aside a moment each day to look into what's really going on around us, at who's really making a difference. Or, perhaps I'll just leave the homepage of Internet Explorer set at MSN and use it, once in a while.

For those of you hoping for some SEO insight, my apologies - I promise you'll find some below and in our articles archives. If you're actually interested (and I hope you are) you can read the full story on the MSN site here.

Labels: msn, norman borlaug

Well it's finally happened, the fine folks over at Redmond seem to be making at least some minor gains against Google and Yahoo! After literally years of losing search market share (due in large part to an under appreciation for what search would mean in the early days) MSN is finally making gains against the search giants.

The latest ComScore results are out and they show the following for the major engines:

• Google sites dropped from 50.7% market share in May 2007 to 49.5% in June showing a drop of 1.2%
• Yahoo! sites dropped from 26.4% market share in may to 25.1% in June with an overal drop of 1.3%
• Microsoft sites rose from 10.3% to 13.2% from May to June with an overall gain of 2.9%
• The Ask network held steady at 5.0% market share
• The Time Warner Network dropped from 4.6% to 4.2% between May and June of 2007
  

Some other points from their stats:

• Americans conducted 8.0 billion searches online in June, up 6 percent versus May and up 26 percent versus June 2006.
• Google Sites led the pack with 4.0 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Ask Network (403 million), and Time Warner Network (341 million). Despite declining in search market share in June, both Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites enjoyed increases in search query volume.
• Microsoft Sites experienced a significant increase in search query volume (up 36 percent) and search market share (up 2.9 share points) in June, due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search.

We of course would once again like to extend our sincere thanks to ComScore for making this information available.

Please note that the variables used to power our free keyword activity tool have been updated to reflect the new marketshare numbers.

Labels: ask, comscore, free seo tools, google, keyword activity tool, market share, msn, time warner, yahoo

Beanstalk's latest article, titled "SEO For Google In Five "Easy" Steps" was published today. This article outlines the five basic steps to ranking your website on Google today, and in the future. It covers:

• Site structure
• Content optimization
• Link baiting
• Link building
• Social media

You can read the article in full here.

Enjoy the read and good luck (unless you're competing against any of our clients of course ;)

Labels: content optimization, google, link bait, link building, seo article, site structure, social media

but you can't make them think.

Two thieves made off with over $12,000 in cash, a laptop, and more in what police referred to as, "a comedy of errors."

We picked up this story on TheRegister.co.uk (always a good source for bizarre information that rarely makes the headlines). The thieves, after struggling for hours with a safe (they had keys and a combination - they just didn't know how the safe worked) went into another room, Googled for instructions, and finally got it after about 75 minutes.

My favorite part of the story is where they used WD-40 to try to blur the cameras. Nice.

The only truly odd part of this story is that they're still at large.

You can read the article on The Register website here.

Labels: google

Last night while sitting in my front yard pondering this latest update on Google (yes I know, I need to get a better hobby) a factor occurred to me that I hadn't considered previously. Now, I haven't had time to really test it yet but I am seeing some evidence of link growth rate being a factor in this recent update on Google.

Essentially what this means is that it is possible that sites with a high growth rate in links are ranking higher than sites that may have more links overall, but who's link acquisition rate is slow.

As noted, I have not had the opportunity to test this or even look into it in great detail however, it occurred to me and there are some indicators that this may be the case and as it was missing from our article on the update I felt it necessary to add it here.

I hope that this update was kind to you all and wish you well through the subsequent adjustments that are sure to come.

Labels: backlinks, google update

As many of you are likely well aware, Google has been tinkering with their algorithm. The update start rearing it's head last Thursday evening and produced some fairly major changes in the results. We have published our latest article on this update and what we've seen as it's causes, effects, and issues.

I won't get into the details here as those of you interested will likely read the article. You'll find it on our website titled, "Google Algorithm Update Analysis". Hope it was nice to you. :)

Labels: google update, seo article

Once again I will be off to San Jose to speak at the Search Engine Strategies Conference which runs from August 20 to 23, 2007. This time I'll be speaking on two panels.

Personalization, User Data & Search
I can tell you in advance that this is going to be my favorite session to speak at as the topic is incredibly interesting to me. I'll be covering how user search data will be combined with the patterns of other similar users to generate the results and how to help insure your site takes advantage of this upcoming technology.

So You Want To Be A Search Marketer!
In this session I'll be helping upcoming SEO's avoid some of the pitfalls of starting a new business on the Internet.

I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to speak at the conference once more and to meeting any of you readers who may be attending.

Labels: personalization, ses sj 2007