Welcome to the August 7, 2005 edition of “Climbing The Beanstalk”, the bi-weekly newsletter on search engines and search engine positioning from Beanstalk. The past couple weeks have provided for some interesting changes in the search engine world. Google has brought us some major updates and that’s not all …
Jack’s House
Beanstalk Internet Marketing’s CEO, Dave Davies has been invited (and accepted) and invitation to join the list of consultants used by the prestigious New York consulting firm, The Gerson Lehrman Group. The Gerson Lehrman Group provides a wide variety of consulting services to it’s clients and Beanstalk is proud to be a part of their team. We would like to take this opportunity to publically thank them for this opportunity.
As a reminder to all webmasters, SEO’s and those thinking of hiring them: Christmas is coming! So often in this industry those of us in the SEO community get phone calls in late October and November from those seeking high rankings for the Christmas season. Search engine positioning is not an overnight thing in most cases and if you want your website ranking over and approaching the holidays then now’s the time to start.
The Giants :
The Top Three …
Google News – The biggest news from Google has little to do with SEO and everything to do with what this giant is up to. On July 21, 2005 Google announced it’s second quarter earnings. Surprise surprise … they had record revenues, coming in at $1.384 billion.
Based on their prediction of a slower 3rd quarter (due to Internet trends – i.e. it’s summer and people are on vacation, not surfing the ‘net) stock prices dropped making now a good time to pick up shares looking forward to the 4th quarter which (because it includes Christmas) should produce higher quarterly revenues than ever.
One day later on July 22nd, Google launched Google Moon. The project was created based on the birthday wish of Google software engineer Larry Schwimmer who shares a birthday with this historic day. Larry had written this desire on a Post It only a week earlier.
It’s definitely worth taking a peek and as a tip (and I won’t tell you why) try scrolling in as close as you can to the moon. 🙂
Visit Google Moon at http://moon.google.com/.
Yahoo! – On July 21st Yahoo! updated it’s algorithm (coincidence that it was the same day that Google was announcing it’s Q2 earnings?) The update seems to filter out a lot of sp@m tactics including the interlinking of sites and many forms of CSS abuse.
This update was followed by a backlink update on August 3rd. Yahoo! provides much more accurate backlink counts than Google. If you want to check your backlinks on Yahoo! simply visit their site and enter “link:http://www.yourdomain.com” into the search bar. If you forget the http:// (as you would on Google) the check won’t work.
On August 3rd Yahoo! also announce that they would be lauching Yahoo! Publisher. Yahoo! Publisher is a system by which webamsters can display Yahoo! paid links on their site in exchange for a percentage of the revenue. Still in beta testing, this challenger of Google AdSense stand to take significant revenue from the until now unchallenged Google.
MSN News – As it turns out, MSN breeds buyers. According to the latest report by comScore Networks, Inc. (a major authority on consumer behavior) of all the search engine users, MSN searchers we the most likely to purchase products and services online. And not just by a bit, MSN searchers were 48% more likely to make a purchase online than the average surfer.
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:
- Total Optimizer Pro – I know, I know … you’ve already hear that. Well the fact is, Total Optimizer Pro is the most used tool at Beanstalk and there’s a reason for it. When it comes to finding links, analysing competition and basically winning the “game” of SEO, there is no tool that stands up the same.
- WebPosition Gold – A tried and test SEO tool. While I would be the first to debate the automated optimization tips it gives (which we’ve long-since given up even peeking at) the rank checking abilities are excellent and fast. A standard in it’s industry it saves us countless hours when determining our client’s positions for multiple keyword phrases over multiple engines.
- The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool (tool no longer exists)- Totally free and an absolute must visit for those in the beginning stages of optimizing their sites. There’s a good chance you’ve used it in the past but be sure to add it to your favorites. Knowing what’s searched today does not help you a year from now. Be sure to check your phrases periodically to make sure that trends haven’t changed.
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.
This article covers the changing technologies and advancements being made by some of the smaller “alternative” engines. Focusing on two upcoming technologies by Claria and Jayde Online this article will give you a glimpse of what they’re doing and what’s sure to be duplicated by the larger engines over time.
Stats, Facts and Organic SEO
Note: link removed as the page no longer exists.
This is a fantastic article by fellow SEO Jim Hedger as found on ISEDB. This article covers some of the most important statistics and studies done with links to the complete information. A must-read for anyone in the SEO industry or those just trying to build and market their sites for maximum effectiveness. It will also give business owners who outsource or are planning to outsource their design and SEO a more complete understanding of the multitude of factors that should be considered.
WebProWorld Forums
There are many forums out there on SEO but the one that seems to have some of the liveliest threads and many knowledgeable posters is the one at WebProWorld. To be sure there are people giving “advice” that doesn’t hold it’s weight on every forum but they tend to be countered pretty quickly on this one.
People to pay attention to in this forum are: jmiller, greeneagle, and of course … beanstalk. 🙂
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.