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.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 12:23 pm
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 !!!
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 2:58 pm
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.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 8:04 pm
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.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:00 pm
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