Climbing the Beanstalk November 2, 2005

Welcome to the November 2, 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

When we were first notified by Shawn over at TopNet Solutions that Total Optimizer Pro was being discontinued we were dismayed. For any of our long-term newsletter subscribers or SEO news blog readers are well aware, we are huge fans of this SEO software. while it was a bit pricey it was worth every penny and was a tool we used (and still use) daily. Well we weren’t about to take this news lying down and so immediately we contacted Shawn to see what we could do. and so Beanstalk now owns 50% of the software and is in charge of marketing and management of it. Additionally, we will undoubtedly be adding new features, dropping the price substantially and, of course, offering our visitors a special discount.

Currently the software is unavailable for download while the site is being moved to a new host and the payment processing is being set up however it should be available by the end of the week. If you would like to be notified when this software is available and what special discount is being extended to our visitors and readers simply send a blank email to [email protected] with “TOP notification” in the subject line or watch our blog for daily updates.

The Giants :

The Top Three …

Google News – Well the latest update has come and it was significant. The most recent update (named Jagger) is coming in 3 parts. The first two are complete and part 3 is still anticipated but can be viewed at various datacenters including 66.102.9.104. Run your searches there and chances are you’ll see very different results.

In what I can only imagine is an effort to avoid the “travesty” that was the Florida Update of November 2003, it appears that they are testing testing testing and actually looking for feedback on the results before introducing the new algorithm into Google.com. A very good idea. 🙂

In other Google news, for those of you who use RSS to keep up with the latest news on your favorite topic you’ll want to check out the new Google Reader available at http://reader.google.com/(Link removed – service discontinued). For more information on this new service and some of the great benefits it provides you’ll want to read an article published by Beanstalk on the day of the launch which can be found here.

And some other big news from Google was the announcement of an alliance between Google and Sun Microsystems. The alliance currently covered the cross promotion of the Google Toolbar and Sun’s Java Runtime Environment. OpenOffice (a free office suite similar to Microsoft Office but without a ton os bell’s and whistles) is sure to become part of the arrangement as time goes on with rumors that Google will be integrating into their toolbar the ability to launch OpenOffice right in your browser and work with it online.

Yahoo! – The biggest news from Yahoo! was from a study they had done which provided some very interesting information for SEO’s and surfer’s alike. The study, written up by MediaPost Publications here, indicated that search engines are considered more credible than TV ads. This is fair enough and easy to understand (though it is food for thought regarding where to put your advertising dollars) however what was truly surprising was that of all the sources of information, search engines are considered the second most trustworthy. Who was #1? Friends and family, and not by very much.

MSN News – While much happened over at Microsoft including the announcement that they will be working with Yahoo! to make their two Instant Messaging systems work together, very little happened this month of the MSN (i.e. search engine) side. There were no major updates or tweaks to their algorithm.

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. Total Optimizer Pro – Recently taken on by Beanstalk Internet Marketing this excellent SEO tool will be relaunching later this week at a reduced price. A must-have for anyone who wants to rank their sites highly in all but the least competitive markets.
  2. A Bunch Of Great Tools – There’s currently a forum thread on the WebProWorld website with links and lists of tons of great SEO tools. Rather than list them all of the above link will take you to the thread where you can read all the summaries and visit the sites directly.
  3. SEO Links (Link removed – no longer available) – This extension for the Firefox browser provides quick access to information on the links and websites you visit. Rather than having to click on a link to get information on the page it leads you you have to simply hover over it and much of that data is provided.

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.

Holiday Buying Stats

The DMA has provided a series of useful stats on people’s upcoming holiday buying. While none of the information is Earth-shattering you’ll find that much of it reinforces the importance of using the Internet as a solid marketing tool.

Web Analytics

This article by Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch covers the importance of analyzing your website statistics. We at Beanstalk are using ClickTracks for advanced website analysis which is undeniably the best tool we’ve found for deep analysis and user behavior analysis (in an easy-to-understand format).

Google Update “Jagger”

This forum thread on the Search Engine Watch website is the best of the forum posts we’ve found on the most recent Google update. Tons of useful information and a good place to watch for Jagger3 to be introduced into the general results. That is of course if you’re not watching the Beanstalk blog where we’ll be keeping you posted (as always) as soon as the update (or any major search engine event) occurs.

Thank You

Thank you very much for subscribing to “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the monthly 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.