Climbing the Beanstalk September 26, 2005

Welcome to the September 26, 2005 edition of “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the monthly newsletter on search engines and search engine positioning from Beanstalk. The past month has provided for some interesting times in the search engine world with a lot of news coming out of Google especially so let’s just get straight to it …

Jack’s House

Beanstalk Internet Marketing has lifted the hold on accepting new client. Last month we had to put a hold on accepting new clients in an effort to insure that our obligations to our existing clients were met. We would like to thank everyone for their understanding during this time and give a special thanks to hose who requested notice when we would be taking on new clients and who have since employed our services.

In other news, Beanstalk is happy to welcome Allan Haggett to our team. He brings with him a long history of experience in a variety of Internet areas and has already proven himself a valuable member of our team.

Important news for those of you who do your own SEO work is that the sale TopNet Solutions has offered on the PR Prowler software is about to expire. They have offered and give all Beanstalk clients and site visitors a $50 discount on this software until the end of September. Regularly $97 they have reduced it to $47. If link building is at all a part of your optimization strategy (and if not … it should be) then we highly recommend this software. We use it every day for virtually every promotion. You can read more details on it on our website. If you want to take advantage of the discount simply click the link at the bottom of the page. It is set up to register that you can from the Beanstalk website and the price will be reduced to $47. If you go straight to their site the price will be $97.

The Giants :

The Top Three …

Google News – Some of the biggest news has little to do with SEO and everything to do with the search engine world. On September 8 Google turned 7. 🙂 they have an interesting a colorful past and I would recommend anyone to read about their history at http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. Very interesting read if only to see how they got to be the most recognized name in the world.

On the 14th of September Google announced the launch of the blog search engine. A very good resources for finding up-to-date information on a variety of topics you can visit it at http://www.google.com/blogsearch. If you do any kind of research or just like current information then this is definitely one for the Bookmarks.

For anyone following the Microsoft vs. Google battle, on the 14th a judge ruled that Dr. Kai-Fu Lee does indeed have the right to work for Google in developing their R&D center in China. A VERY big win for Google.

Yahoo! – On September 14th Yahoo! started the public testing of it’s new Yahoo! Mail. The new mail is getting critical acclaim as far superior to Google’s GMail. You can find more information on it at http://whatsnew.mail.yahoo.com/.

Yahoo! had a couple updates over September but it appears to more of a reshuffling than any sort of new additions to their algorithm. The results stayed fairly similar to what they were prior to any of the updates with only a few site seeing any major changes which of course is a standard occurrence.

MSN News – The biggest issue over at MSN is obviously the loss of their suit against Google regarding the hiring of Dr. Kai-Fu Lee.

In other news however (and much brighter for MSN) is the rumor that MSN will be buying AOL. From Forbes to WebProNews there are predictions and cautions abound as to how this will affect the search landscape, what this will mean to Google, etc. Our prediction, this will lowers Google’s reach (they currently provide the search results for AOL) and will increase MSN’s. Not exactly rocket science but definitely worth noting. MSN will become a more effective engine to rank on a Google will become slightly less. And by slightly we mean slightly.

Useful Tools

We highly recommend checking our these great SEO tools. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer they will save you countless hours and headaches:

  1. PR Prowler – As noted above, PR Prowler is on sale for only a few more days exclusively to clients and visitors to the Beanstalk site. regularly $97 it’s on sale for only $47. A highly recommended tool whether you’re an SEO or just doing links for your one site. it’ll save you countless hours of frustration when you’re looking for relevant, high PageRank links.
  2. TwinEngine (Link removed – no longer available) – A great engine for doing your compare-and-contrast between results on the two biggest search engines. TwinEngine displays the results on Google on the left hand side and yahoo on the right allowing you to easily compare the results for your targeted phrases.
  3. File4Ward (Link removed – no longer available) – While this isn’t an SEO tool it’s a business tool that’s so handy it’s definitely worth mentioning. This free software allows you to connect to your computer securely and remotely and email files from it using any browser including cell phones and PDAs. Best of all, when you email them it’s sent to a secure server for retrieval over 128-bit encryption. You have the option to set a password for the retrieval as well so you’re ensured that the only person who can read the file is the one who should. A very handy tool and highly recommended.

Resources Of Interest

We’re always surfing and always on the lookout for useful information on top of the testing and analyzing we do on our own. Below you will find links to some of the more useful information we have found recently including forum posts and articles.

The Search Engine Marketing Kit

while only chapter one is available free of charge on the SitePoint site it’s definitely worth the read. Written by SEO Dan Thies it covers the development of search engines and is a great read for the novice or the pro SEO.

Keywords, Competition And Being Number One

This article outlines many strategies involved with improving your rankings and beating our those who hold top positions. One this I really liked about the article is that it places, correctly, a good deal of weight on the keyword selection and competition analysis. Truly very important steps that are often given only minimal weight.

The only real point I would argue from the article comes near the very end where he writes, “Don’t ever believe anyone who says they can guarantee any kind of results.” If there are 10 results in the top 10 and one understands that factors involved with getting there then it’s a matter of doing what the sites there have done and then a bit more. But of course I may be biased as at Beanstalk we offer guaranteed services.

Keyword Research Guide

The fine folks at WordTracker have just released a great book on keyword research and how to use it for natural SEO campaigns and paid promotions (different tactics, equally important). The best thing about this book … IT’S FREE!

Of course it contains a lot of WordTracker promotional materials however it also provides a solid amount of very useful information and WordTracker itself is a solid tool and one that’s used here at Beanstalk for keyword research.

Thank You

Thank you very much for subscribing to “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly search engine positioning newsletter. If you have any questions about the areas covered or if there are any areas of search engine positioning that you would like to see covered in future articles/newsletter please don’t hesitate to contact us. We want to write what you want to know.