Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Beanstalk's Dave Davies (that would be me) has been invited (and accepted) an invitation to speak at Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles. The event runs December 3 and 4 at the Hyatt Regency and is completely free for all active affiliates.

I'll be speaking on the topic of SEO for affiliates (a subject I know well as I got my start in SEO marketing affiliate programs :). It's going to be a great show and I'm really looking forward to it.

For those of you in the area, I hope to see you there. :) The price is certainly right.

For more information or to register go to http://www.affiliateconvention.com/.

Labels: affiliate convention

We've just completed part 2 of a 4 part SEO article series. Unfortunately I realized that I didn't blog the publication of part one. The irony here? The article series is on blogging and how it can help your business.

The articles, written by Beanstalk's Director of Copywriting - Matt Tuens, cover:

Yes Your Company Really Does Need A Blog
A article on why your business needs a blog and why.

and

What Type Of Blog Will Benefit My Business The Most
An article outlining different types of blog and the benefits of each for your business.

We hope you enjoy. :)

Labels: blog, seo article

Here at Beanstalk if there is one thing we pride ourselves with is being as flexible as possible for our clients, this is very different from the experience of large box stores such as Best Buy Canada. On Wednesday I received a Best Buy flyer for their store opening sale, and I found myself getting excited as I am a bit of a technophile (PC Desktop with 3 monitors, netbook, HTPC, dSLR, and so on). Leafing through the Best Buy Store Opening flyer I noticed they had a door crasher special for the Gateway LT3108 Athlon64 powered netbook with an 11.6inch screen for just $299!!!! (regularly $449), the very netbook I had been drooling over since I read the first review of. The only problem with door crasher specials is you have to be there extremely early in the morning to line up, and working full time here at Beanstalk the last thing I was going to do is take today off.

After resolving that I wouldn't take the day off to drive out to Langford and line up at Best Buy at 5AM in the morning (given the fact they only had 10 units). I did however decide to look around the Best Buy Canada website out of curiosity to see what else they had to offer. While looking around their website I came across the same Gateway LT3108 netbook for just $349 (still $100 off) for their anniversary sale, however they had already sold out of the product online. Not only had Best Buy Canada sold out of the units the sale ended on October 15th the day before the store even opened! Had the sale been for one more day I would have purchased the netbook after work at the Langford location.

Given the fact that I couldn't justify $449 for this netbook (I bought my Acer Apire One for $329 in August 2008) I decided to try two things. The first was to call Best Buy Canada's customer service and see if I could somehow purchase the product the following day in the store with the discounted price. Unfortunately this didn't work out as the Best Buy head office (or at least customer service) has no say into what happens in Best Buy Canada's retail locations. The second thing I decided to do was when the Langford Best Buy store opened the following day (today) to call and talk to someone in the computers department to see if they would honour the sale price, unfortunately I was read the stock script that Best Buy Canada's flyers change on a weekly basis, and there was now a new flyer with new deals. So thus ends my aspirations of buying this affordable netbook from Best Buy.

Now here at Beanstalk we are happiest when our clients are happy (when they have more traffic, more sales, and they are making more money from our services). As the head of sales here I have been known to work with clients that haggle, bend over backwards to get new clients, and make executive decisions whenever client issues arise. This whole experience with Best Buy Canada has rather soured me to their corporate brand. It also made me reflect on the idea of what would happen if they offered SEO Services, and how they would treat their clients with a one size fits all mentality (whereas we recognize that all clients are different, and have different needs). All I have to say is Best Buy Canada Sucks for their customer experience!

Labels: Best Buy Canada, customer relations, things that suck

Ah, the blessed Google updating - we hate to love it and vice versa. We ran our rankings again for our clients as we've seen a lot of movement lately and the latest round of results appears (for the first time in a while) to widen the gap between the Caffeine results and the live Google.com results. For some - this is a moment of joy and for others, panic. For all - it is temporary (and by temporary I mean more than even a standard update is).

This widening gap is (in my humble opinion) a sign that either the Caffeine results have been deemed to be less relevant than the live results and will be abandoned (in which case we're going to see updating based on a new algorithm here-to-for unseen) OR more likely - the fine folks at Google weren't happy with the portions they were testing and will resume implementing portions of the Caffeine results in the next few days.

Either way - if you saw your results improve - don't go counting your chickens and if you saw drops - don't panic (and yes - I know that's easier said than done). When in doubt - refer back to a previous article I wrote, "What To Do When Your Site Drops". We all deal with it from time-to-time and it provides some solid advice on how we here at Beanstalk deal with it - even when it's our corporate site.

Labels: google update, seo article

Today is Mario's birthday. That's right - Mario first appeared on October 10, 1981 in the classic video game Donkey Kong and has since gone on to do great things such as save princesses, solve incredible puzzles, leap tall buildings, climb pyramids and keep 2 generations of youth well entertained.

Happy birthday big guy.

Labels: mario, nintendo

Today on Webmaster Radio Jim and I had the great pleasure of chatting with Eli Gooman of comScore and Linus Gregoriadis of eConsultancy about the state and future of search. Of course - we also chatted about the beta launch of Google Wave. Let's start this blog post with that. :)

Google has announced the launch of Google Wave and has invited 100,000 people to test out the beta. Because we're only members of the industry press and SEO's with a decade plus of experience each we didn't get the initial invite. No - these invites are provides only tho those entrenched enough to put them up for auction on eBay. :)

That said - Google Wave looks incredibly interesting. From what it is today (a basic realtime collaboration and communication tool) to what it can become (a major influence on websites and communications) I'm going to be very very interested to follow it's development. Not since gMail have I been this interested in a Google product or as excited about the possibilities it presents to users and developers who will have access to their API.

You can watch the launch (when you have an hour-and-a-half to kill). Personally I just kept it playing in a Firefox tab .... errrr ... Chrome tab. Yeah - Chrome, while working on other things.

If you're more interested in the nuts-and-bolts of how to use it you can watch a much shorter video:

I'll write more on this subject when I get my invite. (hint hint Google ;)

In chatting with Eli and Linus (and in prepping for the show) I got a TON of new information and stats on the state of search. All I'll say here is that it's healthy - in fact, online advertising just passed TV for the first time in history. To find out more you'll just have to listed to the show which you can download at http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/webcology/.

As an aside, to keep updated you'd do well to keep up with comScore's releases and read eConsultancy's 5-years-in-the-making Internet Statistics Compendium.

Labels: comscore, econsultancy, eli goodman, google wave