Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Today on Webmaster Radio I had to host the show solo. Our sympathies go out to Jim Hedger who had the unenviable task of heading to Toronto for a funeral. Our hearts go out to Jim and his family.

Todays show however was a great one. We launched our 10-show series on SEO with a show dedicated entirely to keyword research. We're also supplementing each show in the series with an article on the subject at hand. You can find the article here.

Speaking with me on the show was Ken McGaffin from WordTracker, Richard Stokes from AdGooroo.com and Curtis Dueck from Epiar. Each lent an interesting angle to the keyword research discussion and I thank all of them. You can visit the Webmaster Radio site and download the podcast if you missed it.

And from Google ...

While all SEO seems to involve Google, some news came from them today specifically in the form of their 2007 Q4 earnings. Here's the summary:

Revenue of $4.83 billion
51% increase over Q4 2006
14% increase over Q3 of 2007
Google owned sites $3.12 billion
AdSense sites brought in $1.64 billion (up 30% over Q4 2006)

Revenue from outside the US totaled $2.32 billion (48% of revenue - up 4%)

Now here's where I saw something a bit unexpected. Traffic acquisition costs paid to partners increased from $1.22 billion last quarter to $1.44 billion in Q4. Compare this with $1.45 billion generated last quarter vs $1.64 billion in Q4. That means that the amount paid to partners increased by about 18% while the amount earned only increased by 12%. So Google is paying out as a % of revenue more than they were in Q3. That's assuming we all trust stats. :)

Congrats to Google on yet another great quarter. And ya gotta love investors. With a bunch of positive press out prior to the Q4 earning announcement the stock dropped to a low of $534.29 per share at 10am this morning and then rose to a high of $573.00. Basically, someone made 7% ROI in about 6 hours. More than I get in my saving account that's for sure. :)

Labels: adgooroo, epiar, google, jim hedger, webmaster radio, wordtracker

Today I published my most recent article. This article is a bit different. It's on keyword research and is part one of a ten part series. What makes this a bit different is that there will be various authors from various companies publishing in the areas that they know best. We'll also be supplementing the article which will be published each Thursday with a special on Webmaster Radio where we'll have a chance to speak with the tools manufacturers and experts in the area spot lighted that week.

Next week Ross Dunn of StepForth will be writing part two on competition analysis and of course, he'll be a guest on the show along with some guest of his own.

You can read the first article on the Beanstalk site here. You can catch the accompanying radio show on WebmasterRadio.fm at 2PM PST on Thursday. If you miss it don't fret, you can download the podcasts free of charge.

You can read the article on the beanstalk site here.

Labels: keyword suggestion, ross dunn, seo article, webmaster radio

Beanstalk's President Mary Davies entered a acting competition called Film Slam 2008 here in Victoria. It started last Friday night at 6pm with nothing but a script and a bunch of people who didn't know each other and ran until Sunday afternoon with the final product needing to be delivered to the judges by 1pm. At 7pm the films showed to a packed house (I know as I was there) and who won best actress but none other than our Mary Davies (link is to her acting site).

A huge congratulations. The actor in the same film should have, in my opinion, won best actor.

And for those of you interested, here it is:

Labels: film slam, mary davies

Beanstalk will be supporting the SEO Noobs SEO Contest with some prizes. We'll be donating 30 minutes of consulting, an announcement on the Webcology Radio show (hosted by Jim Hedger and Beanstalk's Dave Davies Thursdays at 2PM EST) and an announcement on Beanstalk's blog.

Added in with the other great prizes this should be a great contest. It's a bit different than most as the timelines are extremely short. The phrase will be one that doesn't exist yet, the contest will launch on February 4 and the goal is to rank the site by March 4.

You'll be up against the Beanstalk team however, other than the trophy, we'll be donating any prize we might win (if we do) to the highest ranking newbie in the list (i.e. the highest ranking person with less than a year of experience in SEO). And of course, if we get beaten by a newbie I have to fess up and announce it here. :) Pressure's on ...

Also, we're going to be taking this opportunity to test a couple different tactics against each other and see which ones work in such a short timeframe. We'll be keeping you posted here. For information on the specific domains (coming once the contest starts) you can keep posted at our first Yicrosoft directory (SEO) site and our second Yicrosoft directory (Webmaster).

You'll find details on the contest on the SEO Noobs website here. (Note: hyperlink removed as the site's been taken down)

Good luck to all who compete.

Update: the contest is now on for "yicrosoft directory". Entrants will be shooting to compete to rank a site in the top three results of Google within one month for "yicrosoft directory" with a brand new domain (not registered before February 4, 2008). Good luck to all who oppose us. :)

Labels: jim hedger, seo contest, seo noobs, webmaster radio, yicrosoft directory

Today, being Thursday, was the day that Jim Hedger and I host our weekly radio show on Webmaster Radio. it was a great show with a focus on Yahoo! in the news and a great interview with Applied SEO's John Carcutt.

There were two big stories about Yahoo! going on. The first was the introduction of Delicious info into the results. While most of us currently aren't seeing it, a beta rollout of the new feature is live to many. For those who can, below the description in the search engine results Yahoo! is placing information from Delicious including the number of times the page has been bookmarked and it's tags.

This of course lead to a discussion about how useful this could be to a searcher and how abused this could be by SEO's. I liken it to the green bar PageRank. When we didn't see it we didn't focus on it but as soon as it became visible it became the crack of the SEO industry (except more expensive in many cases).

Hopefully Yahoo! has learned from Google's error and we'll see some great controls. You can read a great article about the launch on Search Engine Land at http://searchengineland.com/080121-095345.php.

We then discussed the massive layoffs over at Yahoo! reported by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and a whole lot more. Will this be the downfall of Yahoo!? Can they keep up if they have less staff? Are they just trimming the fat? The conclusion - we'll have to wait and see. You can read an article on the subject by Jim Hedger as well on the New York Times site.

After a quick break we interviews John Carcutt from Applied SEO on his interesting business model of white label SEO. He works for other firms, as those firms, gives them the credit and collects the paycheck. Not a bad model and a great guy. Thanks again John from the great hat at SES San Jose 2006 !!!

Labels: applied seo, deliscious, jim hedger, social media, webmaster radio, yahoo

This will be a very quick post to provide you, our valued readers, with a link. I've recently stumbled upon an interesting debate over at Sphinn based on an article by WeBuildPages' own Jim Boykin. The debate is on paid links and it's one of the more interesting I've seen recently with lines attempting to be drawn and people trying to figure out the different between an unguaranteed review (such as Yahoo!) and a paid review.

It's an eternal debate and won't be settled here but good to follow anyways. :)

You can read the back-and-forth at http://sphinn.com/story/24523.

Labels: jim boykin, paid links, sphinn, webuildpages

ComScore today released their numbers for December 2007 and Google took a bit of a slide. Here's what happened in December:

• Google dropped 0.2% from 58.6% to 58.4% of the market share
• Yahoo! gained ground, up 0.5% from 22.4% to 22.9% market share
• Microsoft heald steady at 9.8%
• Time Warner gained 0.1% market share getting 4.6%
• And Ask (sorry guys) lost ground going from 4.6% to 4.3% of the search market share

Also interesting to note is that overall search volume dropped in December, down 3.9% from November (apparently people feel the need to pry themselves away from their computer and perhaps chat with offline friends over the holidays :)

You can view the full press release on the ComScore site here.

We have updated the numbers used by our free keyword activity tool to reflect these new numbers.

In other news:

Jim Hedger and I have decided that we're going to run a great series of articles and interviews for WebmasterRadio.fm starting next week. Keep watching this space for more information as the topics (great for anyone interested in SEO) are posted. We'll have great guests and great guest writers.

Labels: comscore, jim hedger, market share, webmaster radio

After a mere 10 years the W3C Group has finally published its first public working draft of HTML 5. This latest HTML draft reflects the growing needs of the web, and has extended in several new directions. Some of the new inclusions are APIs for 2D Drawing, better control over embedded multimedia, and a huge list of changes.

"Ajax and related innovations have propelled demands for a new standard that allows people to create web applications that interoperate across desktop and mobile," the group said.

Additionally according to the W3C Group, HTML 5 will: "Improve interoperability and reduce software costs by giving precise rules not only about how to handle all correct HTML documents but also how to recover errors."

With all this is mind, you will only need to wait around 3 years for the spec to be finished.... browsers to support it.... and the public to embrace it.... for proof of this look no farther then CSS 1.0 which wasn't really heavily used (as intended with Pure CSS Design something Beanstalk specializes in) until around 2003, which came out in 1999.

Labels: html, w3c

This morning while checking some of my personal project websites I noticed a few had some extra green in the pagerank bar than normal. Most of these sites are rather fresh out of the box and were previously either a page rank zero or unranked. This comes as a surprise since the last update was not too long ago. At first I decided to look around and see how far this update had infected the data centres. Other SEO and SEM users have been reporting similar trends on many different search news sites. As of this writing the update appears to have affected mostly young sites and a handful of larger ones. This is definitely not a slap like the big penalty update at the end of 2007. As with all updates the search results are shifting around as we entertain another google dance.

On the contrary there is at least one large spanking that has certainly taken place. Technorati has been stripped of all it's pagerank leaving them with a pagerank zero. There are only a few sub pages that have held pagerank: Entertainment, Sports, Popular, Help (which is a sub domain) all still have something higher than a zero.

It would seem despite popular myth that the green bar is not going anywhere anytime to soon. The web master radio show today features a segment regarding this update. I suspect that another blog post will follow this one with more information and details.

Labels: google update, pagerank

Danny Sullivan (a.k.a. The Godfather to those of us in the SEO realm) messed up, kind of. In a post he OK's for the Search Engine Land a couple days ago titled, "Get A Free Link From Wired" they basically outline how to get yourself a free link on the wired.com site. I especially love the "don't be too evil" note which implies that some amount of evil is OK.

Now I'm going to note here before I go on that WIRED IS MODERATED - that's why they don't use the rel=nofollow. It shouldn't and can't really be sp@mmed and you're only wasting your time and everyone else's trying to. This was an oversight in the first article.

Danny today published an apology to wired and to the SEO community. It appears that the post got quite the attention from a number of SEO's including (of course) Doug Heil (Mr. My-White-Hat's-Whiter-Than-Yours-Except-When-I'm-Trying-To-Get-My-Way). It's true the post is a but questionable (as I said ... the "don't be too evil" quote leaves some room) but let's be honest - we all make errors in judgement. I posted a blog about rel=nofollow carrying weight. To me it was an interesting test. The next thing I knew I read a blog on another site, "Blogspam works but only in large amounts" written about the test. Not really what I had in mind.

So let's all forgive Danny the oversight and remember, at worst is was some great unintentional (?) link baiting. At best, it got us all talking and pointed out to Wired an issue wither their system that should probably be addressed (maybe rel=nofollow until it's moderated?)

Good luck to both parties.

You can read more about the hoop-la here.

Labels: danny sullivan

Today while sorting through the daily news I came across a truly bizarre posting about a Kids book written by Microsoft. So what exactly is the message of this "Educational kids book", well its to promote their new Windows Home Server. And its official if a Dadddy loves a mommy, and wants to get her a special gift, she will love a "Stay at home server", which he can install himself! But I think thats enough of a spoiler to truly appreciate the book you must read it your self. Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?

But hey at least now you will know why the kids may be making fun of you, because they're just jealous deep down and wishing their daddies would buy them a stay at home server...

Congrats Microsoft on some great corporate conditioning branding, and a fine piece of link bait.

Labels: branding, link bait, microsoft

I realized upon setting up to write this post that I need to apologize to you, our valued blog visitor. In logging into Bl0gger I noticed that it was in fact a week ago that I wrote last. Unacceptable. To remedy these delays between posting I'm going to try to post more often AND within the next couple weeks you'll start reading from some new voices over here at Beanstalk including those of Daryl Quenet and Ken Nichol. This will also provide some different perspectives and topic than just my one lone voice can provide. So stay tunes and don't forget to Bookmark us (and if you use Google bookmarks or one of the other great social bookmarking sites ... all the better :).

But now onto the real post:

Today, being Thursday - I did my weekly show on Webmaster Radio. It was a great show with a great guest and, as always, I was joined by Jim Hedger. As we usually do, Jim and I spent the first 15 minutes discussing some of the major goings-on in the search engine world. Today this included:

• Jim Lanzone leaving Ask - The Internet Marketing community mourns the loss of Jim Lanzone from Ask. Jim revitalized Ask.com and under his leadership turned the engine into a world leader (if not in market share then in technology). He will be missed but at the same time we're all excited to see what his successor Jim Safka can do.
• Microsoft To Buy Fast Search Engine - Microsoft has made an offer of $1.2 billion for the Fast search engine. This move stands to shake up Enterprise search considerably and will be a "need to watch" issue after the sale completes (likely in Q2 of this year).
• Google hits 66% market share - Hitwise has releases their stats for December in regards to search market share. It appears Google is up yet again. The stats are:
  
  Google - 65.98%
  Yahoo! - 20.88%
  MSN - 7.04%
  Ask - 4.14%
  
  
• Aaron Wall PPC v SEO Debate - Aaron Wall yesterday posted a blog on the SEO vs. PPC debate. Jim and I quickly discussed how one affects the other and how it's difficult to track what campaign is providing what result when the combination may be increasing overall conversions. We skipped through this section and when we came back we were able to discuss it with ...

Andrew Goodman from PageZero.com. Page Zero just launched into organic SEO - a jump from pure PPC Management they have provided thus far. Jim and I pelted Andrew with questions and got some great info. I'm going to be a jerk though and make you visit the Webmaster Radio site and download the podcast or read the transcripts on the Webmaster radio site. They should be available in the next 24 hours (at least the podcast - the transcripts can take a bit longer).

Labels: aaron wall, andrew goodman, ask, google, market share, microsoft

Today on Webmaster Radio Jim Hedger and I had the opportunity to discuss a number of topics. You can download the podcast of the show (recommended) in the next couple days from the Webmaster Radio site. It's also a good idea to visit it as there are many great shows and information for all levels of listener.

In every show Jim and I take some time to discuss the latest goings-on in the search engine world. Here's what we had for our listeners this week:

• ComScore metrics - ComScore released it's totals for the holiday season of 2007 with a 19% increase in sales over 2006 reaching over $28 billion in online sales. On boxing day the total crossed $545 million doubling boxing day sales from last year.
• Danny Sullivan Article - Jim and I discussed one of the best pieced of predictive writing I've ever seen. Danny Sullivan wrote a great piece as a time traveling reporter from 2010 discussing the breakup of Google. While I doubt it'll come true it's an awesome piece that helps give us a small glimpse and one possible future we SEO's and search marketers have in store for us.
  
• Traffic Power and Matt Marlon - Sometimes bad things happen to good people and that's always a sad day. Sometimes bad things happen to bad people and that's ... well ... karma. Matt Marlon, ex-CEO of Traffic Power (an SEO firm that got all their clients banned by Google) was arrested for ... you'll never guess ... fraud. Just like those website owners that he helped scam and get banned with Traffic Power, Matt seems to like kicking people when their down and has taken advantage of a horrible situation and (pardon my French) screwed people out of their homes during the forclosure issues. Personally I'm happy with the outcome and this time I don't think he can try to sue Aaron Wall for reporting on it. ;)
• Aaron Wall's rants - and speaking of Aaron Wall, he's been ranting over the last few days about the state of SEO. I can't do justice to his comments save-to-say ... I agree. THe lines of Walmart coming into the arena devalues the service. Fortunately (unfortunately for clients) they're sure to realize that this isn't the kind of service that can be bulk packages and whipped out at discount prices and still have some reasonable amount of quality control.
  

After a brief commercial break Jim and I came back with WeBuildPages' own Jim Boykin (who I had the pleasure of meeting at SES San Jose last year. Jim has just launched InternetMarketing Ninjas.com where he provides videos from some of the SEO greats and many free tools (if you're willing to pay the $2,995 per year for the videos). I haven't had a chance to view the videos and, as Jim notes, the service is offered more to do-it-yourselfers than SEO's so I likely won't however the names and topics covered are definitely spot-on. Maybe Jim will give me a free sneak-peek (hint hint Jim ;) and I can report on it more thoroughly.

Good luck to Jim and the ninjas !!!

And in other news:

The latest article by Beanstalk is out. I wrote and article that changed considerable from idea to finished product (meaning there's another coming out soon). The article is on finding a good SEO-friendly web designer and can be found on the Beanstalk site here.

Labels: aaron wall, comscore, danny sullivan, google, jim boykin, jim hedger, traffic power, webmaster radio