Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Beanstalk's assortment of free SEO tools are once again back online. We experienced some limited issues with a hosting switch and rendered many of the tools inoperative however the issue has been rectified and once more - you're welcome to use our assortment of free SEO tools ranging from advanced rank checking tools to link building and onsite optimization tools.

Now that this problem is solved we'll begin working on some exciting new tools - coming soon. :)

You can test the current ones on our free SEO tools page.

Labels: free seo tools

2009 has started off great thanks to Advanced Web Ranking and Top SEOs. Advanced Web Ranking made it a great morning by providing me with the monthly ranking reports for a number of our clients. So I suppose it isn't *really* Advanced Web Ranking so much as a great team of dedicated SEOs and link builders who made that a great experience but I've got enough happiness to go around.

And Top SEOs helped make it a great morning by once again handing us two awards:

• Best in Organic Optimization
• Best in SEO Training

As with Advanced Web Ranking - I suppose it's more our great staff that I have to thank for these awards but I'll do that when I get back from holidays ... for now I'll thank Top SEOs for recognizing our hard work and presenting us with this honor.

And a big thanks to you as well - our blog readers and clients. We grew teremendously in 2008 and I'm looking forward to growing with you through 2009. Watch for some big changes to our blog frequency and free SEO tools in the near future.

A Reminder

Don't forget to change the copyright date on your websites.

Labels: beanstalk, blog, free seo tools, organic optimization, seo training, topseos

On an almost daily basis I get emails from people asking me to review this SEO tool or that or take a peek at this article or what not. As our regular blog readers will know, I've spared you the majority of them and for good reason. I try to only include reviews of the tools and information I either will use or like but might not use (for example, tools geared towards people new to SEO that I feel would have been helpful about 8 years ago when I was getting my start but that might not be as helpful now that I already use about a dozen tools and Firefox extensions. :)

That said, I generally give them a peek to make sure I'm not missing a gem.

Today I got an email from Sam who wanted me to take a peek at his new tool at ReviewMyWeb.com. It's a comparison tool that looks at a number of factors comparing your site and 2 of your competitors. I gave it a peek and for someone new to SEO and looking for some pointers on areas they need to address - it's a pretty good tool indeed (and the price is certainly right - can't argue with free).

So kudos to Sam for developing a neat tool. It's probably won't make my personal must use list only because the information it provides is redundant to a lot of the tools I already use BUT for those of you reading this post - you should give it a peek. It may provide some info you don't already collect or have tools for. You can find it on their site at http://www.reviewmyweb.com/.

Labels: free seo tools

As someone who's used and tested a click fraud detection and tracking system called PPC Assurance I received an email earlier from their CEO with a special offer. The offer was for a free trial of their full system which was just completed. Rather than summarize I'll just copy-and-paste the email information. But first, you may want to read a bit about PPC Assurance to get an idea about what it is. We've got a short write-up on our PPC Engines page.

But what's the offer? Here's what I got in my email:

We’re offering you a FREE TRIAL of our full PPC Assurance reporting service until December 14, provided you sign-up by November 2. Once the trial is over, you’ll also get the discounted price we’re offering for future months!

The faster you sign up, the faster you’ll get your PPC campaigns audited and your money back for any bad clicks! If you choose to cancel, email us before December 14, and we won’t bill you on December 1. It’s that simple.

Sign up today, for your FREE Trial on PPC Assurance at http://ppcassurance.enquisite.com/couponcode.html, sign in, sign-up, and you’re off!

On the payment information page (specifically the credit card entry screen) enter the coupon code "ENQ-1102". The purchase process will only accept that code or an empty coupon box.

This tool is highly recommended for anyone running a PPC campaign. From the day I first got a look at it in San Jose when I was sitting on a panel with Richard Zwicky I was impressed, I have since recommended it to clients and will extend that recommendation on to you. And let's face facts, ... the price is right. :)

Labels: enquisite, free seo tools, google click fraud, ppc

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

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

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 (tool discontinued due to the lack of data from Overture) 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