Welcome to the June 28, 2005 edition of “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly newsletter on search engines and search engine positioning from Beanstalk. While generally a pretty quite past couple weeks in the search engine world from an update standpoint there have been some interesting developments in regards to the business of search.
Jack’s House
As a notice to all our clients and those who may be contacting us, Dave Davies – CEO of Beanstalk – is taking a whole week off work. From June 29th until July 5th he will be occasionally checking his emails to reply to emergencies (and that does mean emergencies 🙂 and the rest of the time he will be enjoying seven consecutive days of relaxations with his family (or as much relaxation as one can have with two very active young boys. 🙂
As noted, he will be checking his emails periodically (this means about 3 times over the week) and responding to any critical issues at that time.
The Giants :
The Top Three …
Google News – While there haven’t been any major updates to report since the last newsletter this certainly shouldn’t be take as nothing going on over at Google headquarters. For those of you who read our blog you may already know this but for those of you who count on our newsletter to stay updated the following Google news may be new.
Rumors abound over the upcoming launch of “Google Wallet”. Google will be providing a payment solution of their own. While they deny that it is set up to rival PayPal, eBay (owners of PayPal) stock dropped and Google stock rose over the announcement. Time will tell but it’s a very big market and I can’t see Google ignoring the vast revenue that could be gained from taking PayPal down a couple notches.
Google video search, similar to the video search function of many other engines, took the lead with the development of their own player that allows users to play the video right from their browser. Google video search further allows those who submit videos to charge for viewing. You can try the search and download the viewer by visiting http://video.google.com/.
And lastly in Google news (but definitely not least) is the launch of Google Earth. This piece of software is the coolest of it’s kind that we’ve seen and rather than try to describe it we highly recommend visiting http://earth.google.com/, downloading the software and trying it out for yourself.
Yahoo! – Nielson/Netratings released it’s Top 10 most popular websites for May of 2005 and Yahoo! topped the list. ironically Google cam in #4 after Microsoft and MSN.
MSN News – Not perfected yet but definitely worth checking out and monitoring is MSN’s newly released “local search”. they can automaticaly detect where you’re from (simply enough) and provide results for searches such as “bakery” in regards to your location.
A very good feature for those seeking products and services in their own region. You can test it for yourself at http://local.msn.com/.
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:
- PR Prowler (link no longer available) – The newest verion on PR Prowler was just released this week. We at Beanstalk have always been fans of this essential link building tool and the enhancements in the newest version only make it more appealing. Faster searches, easier interface and more attractive to name the least. If you find link building a tedious excersise (and who doesn’t) then this tool should definitely be added to your SEO arsenal. It will at least duble your productivity if not more.
- Domain Explorer – This is a Whois source taken to the next level. If you’re wondering about your competitors, where their sites are located, what kind of hosting environment they’re on, whether they have a DMOZ listing or not, etc. this is the tool for you. At the same site you will also find some other interesting tools for hunting down the perfect domain name.
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.
Google Directory – Google pulls it’s directory right from DMOZ so a DMOZ listing automatically gets you listed in the Google directory. So what makes the Google directory better you might ask? the Google directory ranks the sites in it not by when they were added or alphabetically but rather by PageRank. If you’re doing link building and want high PageRank links this is a great place to start.
The Beanstalk Blog – At Beanstalk we publish our blog at /blog/. This blog contains daily news on the search engines and their going’s on. Very useful if you want to keep updated on the who’s-who and the what’s-what of the search engine world.
Normally we have 3 or 4 resources however there’s haven’t been any major articles or forum threads that we’ve found that would be of significant interest to our readers. We’d rather have a shorter list than one filled with uninteresting resources.
The newsletter is free and provides valuable information for SEO’s and webmasters.
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.