Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

I received an interesting email regarding an often used technique for hiding content. I could describe it but you can see what's what at http://www.hireacamera.com/. Just click the "Resources" link at the button and watch the text appear.

Now, I consider this to be cloaking but I want to know what others think. As we don't allow commenting on our blog (unfortunately I just don't have the time to moderate posts) I've started a thread at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1323546 with a poll. Let me know what you think. :)

Labels: black hat, cloaking

Sometimes we at Beanstalk have some analytical gem to pass on (or at least - what we think is) and sometimes I'm just impressed at what others have written. In the case of the latter, I try not to regurgitate what's been said. Below you'll find a Coles-notes version of a great article I read on social media and a link to the source so you can get the full feel for yourself.

Kristine Schachinger over at the StandardsGirl blog wrote a solid piece on social media. In the post she questions the impact of social media and the feeling of connectedness we all get from it. Are we really more connected now or have we simply lost touch with our "real" friends in lieu of friends we can keep at 140 characters or less?

Kristine doesn't debate the merits of social media from a marketing perspective but she does question whether the growth of social media has impacted our real-world experiences and interactions. A great read and while it won't help you optimize your site, it will help you understand the electronic world around you jsut a little bit better.

You can read her full post on the StandardsGirl.com site in the post, "Social Media - The Illusion of Connectedness?".

Labels: social media

Happy Earth Day everyone! I'd like to say that in the spirit of conserving energy and resources we were all going to turn off our computers and lights but I have a strong suspicion that our clients might now be as happy with that as the planet (and staff) might be. :)

But do what you can, reuse what's possible and recycle the rest.

In the spirit of the day and of helping the planet, I'm going to ask for your help in building a playground for my childrens' school. Their playground is being torn down by the city (admittedly - it is about 20 years old) but on the down side - they're not replacing it.

So we've got to come up with the money to replace the playground if we want our children to be able to play and to that end - we're fundraising. In this case, we're holding an auction at the school. We've got a large number of items but we can always use more - we do have to raise tens of thousands of dollars after all.

You can see a list of some of the donation made by the friends of Beanstalk on our South Park School Auction page. Anyone who donates an auction item worth more than $100 gets some free publicity with a mention on our site and of course, you get to feel good. :)

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or woudl like to donate and item(s).

Labels: beanstalk, earth day

We just finished airing a great episode of Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm. Today we covered a bit of news including the free-to-attend Affiliate Convention - organized in part by my co-host Mr. Jim Hedger.

Our first guest today was none other than Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz who discussed a great paper they recent published on link building titled, "The Professional's Guide To Link Building" (which - I'll point out - the fact that I'm linking to it in this blog post proves one of their link building points). Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in building links.

We discussed link profiles, what to look for when analyzing your competitors and how to determine the right strategy for your link building efforts.

Rand also discussed with us some comments made by Seth Godin regarding how to make money from SEO and whether or not SEO's need to know code (apparently 21% of SEO's polled don't think they do).

After Rand, Jim and I had the pleasure of chatting with Barrie North from Joomla Shack who discussed with us the benefits of Joomla as well as other SEO-friendly CMS systems. We covered issues such as easy-of-use and what to take into account when first setting up your site.

If you missed this great episode you can listen to or download the podcast from the Webmaster Radio site here.

Labels: affiliate convention, barrie north, joomla, link building, rand fishkin

Beanstalk SEO will be closed from April 10 until the 13 for the Easter long weekend. Easter is a statutory holiday up here in Canada and as such - our doors will be closed.

Many of us will be checking emails over the weekend so you can communicate with us that way though unless it's an emergency - it may be Tuesday before we're able to get back to you.

Thanks for your understanding and happy holidays to you all.

Labels: easter

I just got off the phone with one of my clients that is irate with Hostway Hosting which recently purchased the hosting company he was with Valueweb Hosting. Now mergers and acquisitions in the hosting sector are rather common as it is a quick way for a hosting company such as Hostway Hosting to pick up additional clients with little effort. However there are ways to do a seamless hosting acquisitions, and then there are ways that just leave clients high and dry, this is exactly what Hostway Hosting has done for him.

Yesterday this client received an email from Hostway Hosting specifying that they were about to upgrade his account within the next 48 hours over to their hostway web servers, and on top of that Hostway hosting was going to charge them close to 50% more for the same hosting! In both my eyes and his eyes this is unacceptable as quite often when running an e-commerce site there is a lot of under the hood code changes that may be required. In fact this client has a legacy Perl website, that uses a shared SSL certificate Valueweb had provided and there was no indication that Hostway would have one for them. It is no where near acceptable that they expected all of the website changes to be done within 48 hours, I have lots of clients whose webmasters take several weeks to make changes to their websites!

As it stands the client has asked me which web hosting company I recommend because he is done with Hostway Hosting. I tried to call them to talk to someone over there about this and found it rather humerus that there tag line was "Where we are passionate about web hosting", passionate is such a funny word. I tried to get a hold of someone in marketing through the Hostway SEO & Web Design sales department but after waiting on hold for over 10 minutes I decided to just give up as the passion was surely lacking.

So Hostway Hosting is now on the Beanstalk SEO web hosting blacklist along with Network Solutions, IXWebhosting, and Go Daddy's free web hosting.

Labels: customer relations, hostway, hostway hosting, web development, web hosting