Raven Tools for SEO and Social Media

One thing I really like about working at a small businesses is the ability to work with people directly. My very first paid Web host was a company called Funio (they’re not around anymore). I was brand new to hosting, and I was learning PHP and HTML at the same time out of a book. That Web host was small enough to give me the time and service I needed while I was trying to get over the curve. It’s important to be able not only personally accommodate, but over-accommodate when it’s necessary.

In a post at the end of September, I briefly complimented the Raven Tools help system on another blog of mine. Less than a week later I got an email from @RavenJon thanking me for the mention, and offering me use of Raven Tools for the following three months at no charge. It just so happened that that following Friday Everett sent me an email telling me my SEO internship had been extended for three additional months. I’m not mentioning the gesture for full disclosure, however I wanted to mention the awesomeness of it and the irony of when it came.

When my internship was extended I was given two different portals to paid membership communities. The sites had little to no optimization, and they had in-depth SEO audits that were two or more years old. I was given the logins and a cubicle. The first thing I did was plug the sites into Raven to see how it all worked. Their setup wizard was super easy to set up. It was able to auto-detect keywords and competitors and I was able to add them to the monitoring system – or not – with a single click.

Once the site was plugged into the Raven Tools system I was allowed to automatically research keyword competitors. Raven Tools will examine the keywords that it extracts from the site as well as ones that I submitted manually. It will track your web site’s SERP ranking for each word, determine your competitors and display your positions side by side.

I used this as a barometer to show me how well the work I was doing was benefiting the site. Naturally I was already on page 1 for nearly all of the brand related terms, however there many select terms that could have been performing better. I was able to see the page 1 and 2 performers at a glance so I could work strategically to improve their individual SERP rankings.

With Raven’s competitor manager I could add and subtract competitors manually. Once inside I could look at each competitor’s quality score, page rank, inbound link count and number of indexed pages. This tool was not only useful to gauge the competition, but it also helped me to determine the value of different link building opportunities.

The link manager was probably the most valuable and unique tool on Raven’s SEO arsenal. Link building is arguably the most difficult and hard to manage part of SEO that I had to learn. Raven’s link manager for link building laid everything out quickly and logically. It allowed me to categorize the type of link I was after and even auto-filled things like title, anchor text and link URL. You could easily change the status from a link that was requested, scheduled, active and inactive. One of the most helpful aspects of this link management tool is that it checked the links and automatically notified me if changes had occoured in the anchor text, PageRank, if the nofollow attribute was added, or the link was removed all together. Brilliant!

Raven Tools does a bunch of other stuff like social media profile monitoring, Google Analytics integration and even allows you to post directly to Wordpress blogs. Raven’s system helped me organize the information I was gathering, and laid it out in a way that was very easy to understand. This set of tools ended up being essential in organizing and reporting the data I generated as I was learning SEO.

Because of the help I got by using Raven Tools for SEO and Social Media, I was able to produce a drastic increase of organic search engine traffic to the projects I was working on. In the fourth quarter 2009, my primary project saw a 871% increase in organic search engine traffic over fourth quarter 2008, and a 116% increase in organic search engine traffic over third quarter 2009, for its top 25 targeted keywords.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.