JAR SEO: Episode 2
In Josh and Matt’s second SEO podcast they discuss BakeSpace.com, more SEO intricacies, and their tool of choice, Raven SEO.
If you missed it before, listen here!
Matt Lerche: Woohoo!
Josh Unseth: I like that.
Matt: You like that?
Josh: [laughs] It makes me really excited to talk to air.
Matt: Yeah. [laughter]
Matt: We’re recording now. We’re live, for podcast number two.
Josh: Live whenever you’re playing it.
Matt: We’re on.
Josh: We’re on. [laughs] Great. So, this week, we’ve got a really excited show lined up for you. The show is excited. We have a really exciting show lined up for you. We’re going to be doing a site assessment on BakeSpace.com and talk a little bit about something I did this week with food bloggers, and then Matt’s going to launch into some really, really geeky and exciting statistics about Internet search and the World Cup.
Matt: Yes, yes.
Josh: And finally, we’re going to close it all off with a great little tool assessment on one of our favorite tools, Raven SEO.
Matt: Yeah. Good tool. Really like it.
Josh: Love it. So, anyhow, BakeSpace.com.
Matt: Yeah, BakeSpace.com, which appears to be a social network for people who enjoy baking.
Josh: Absolutely. So the reason I picked this is because I got to speak at a conference this last week called TECHmunch, in New York, and it was run by the woman who runs the site, BakeSpace. So I thought that it would be a great opportunity for you and me to talk a little bit to our listeners about things like rich snippets and sites like recipe sites, rating sites, and other various, sundry SEO topics that may crop up as we take a look at the site. Shall we begin?
Matt: Let’s begin.
Josh: OK. So, first thing. I come to the site. I think that they have pretty decent URLs, actually, although I do notice that they do not resolve WWW, non‑WWW. Their site goes to both.
Matt: Yeah, so it looks like they’re not redirecting the canonical version.
Josh: Exactly.
Matt: OK. Looks like they do have clean URLs throughout. I’m just kind of skimming, looking. There’s a lot of content on this site. Huge.
Josh: That’s what I really like about it is that you have sites like Facebook that have tons and tons of user‑created content, but sites like BakeSpace are nice because the user‑created content isn’t behind a walled garden. It’s there for Google to see. It’s there for the search engines to find. They have tons of content that’s created by their users, specifically recipes, and as a result, they get tons of traffic.
Matt: Yeah. I bet. The whole food vertical, recipes, sort of that stay‑at‑home‑mom type websites seem to very, very, very popular. So something like this is probably going to draw a ton of users who are going to upload their content, which makes it unique. Now you know you have thousands of authors for all your content.
Josh: Yeah. I really enjoy websites that pull out and use sort of the social model, where users are basically doing the work for the creator of sites.
Matt: Exactly.
Josh: The one thing that I would say that I think this site has a big problem with is that they don’t use alt descriptions very well.
Matt: I wouldn’t say it’s a gigantic problem. I would say it’s an issue that could be brought up and probably resolved, but I wouldn’t think of it as a huge make‑or‑break or a deal‑breaker issue.
Josh: No, it’s absolutely not a deal‑breaker issue. But I would think, for a site that deals with food and has lots and pictures, stuff like that, alt tags could really jump the site up in the search. The beauty of getting images high in an image search is that you basically have a first‑place ranking, especially if it’s one of those queries that lands the images in the first results.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: Using alt tags well, and utilizing your header tags and such well, and having your good keywords throughout there, you’re going to land you many better chances to land an image on the first page for queries that do have that. And I would think that that would be the case with a number of recipe queries, that those first results would be occupied by images.
Matt: Yeah. And I think one thing to look out in that case, too, is image leechers, basically anybody who’s ripping images. When somebody clicks within Google’s image search, it’s to redirect the user to the actual page rather than just stealing the image and just implementing something to keep them from leeching those images, or else anybody and everybody is going to be taking them, especially from recipe blogs.
Josh: Yeah. And there’s JavaScript redirects that will handle that.
Matt: Yeah. This is a good site. I’ll have to tell my wife about this. [laughter]
Josh: Is that a little bit, Matt, like telling your kids that, I don’t know, Barney’s outside or something?
Matt: Yeah, yeah. Do a little hint, hint. “They’re making apple pies on there.” [laughter]
Josh: ”Hey, kids, there’s a really fun thing outside. You should go play with it.” [laughter]
“It’ll babysit you for an hour.”
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: ”Hey, hon, there’s a website.” No, I’m kidding.
Matt: [laughs]
Josh: Don’t get mad at me, wives. Get mad at Matt.
Matt: Yeah. Bring it on. [laughter]
Josh: The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about was rich snippets. Google recently has opened up their search functions to basically include recipes. So if you search for a number of recipes, if it’s done well on certain sites, you’ll notice that they have everything from ratings to sometimes little images next to the search result. Using rich snippets, if you’re a site owner for a food blog or something like it, if your website’s included in the kinds for snippet functionality, or has the capacity for it, then they’re amazing ways to kind of encourage click‑throughs, right? Because if your post is link 110 on the search‑engine results page and you’re the only one with a picture next to it, you’re going to have a higher click‑through rate if you’re number six or number seven if you have that picture, and even if you’re in the top two or three, than you would otherwise.
Searchers like images, especially images that are the things they’re describing. Like if I type in “muffins” I’m more likely to click on the post that has a big old picture of a delicious muffin next to it than I am just text, right?
Matt: I bet. [laughing] I bet you would.
Josh: I’ll click on a muffin any day.
Matt: And that kind of goes back to: Internet users are lazy. Nobody wants to sit at their desk and read. They want to look at pictures and find something compelling to draw their interest in. and there’s nothing better in a search result than some type of an image that’s going to pique curiosity.
Josh: Right. I think that that’s a side of search‑engine optimization that we often ignore, right? That the part that gets click‑throughs is a search engine. I could do whatever I can to get your website ranked number five, six, seven, maybe one. Number one, always. I promise that I can get your website ranked number one, for any query. Just kidding.
Matt: [laughs]
Josh: I can do the work to get your website ranked real high. But unless I focus on what it takes to get users to click on that listing, then my work is no good to you.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: When I do posts, I always include a giant picture of Matt, because he’s beautiful.
Matt: There’s nothing sexier than that.
Josh: You are handsome.
Matt: I know.
Josh: [laughs]
Matt: Not to toot my own horn or anything, but…
Josh: I’ll tell you, I put a picture of Matt there and Google picks it up, I have a result ranked number 10, it gets 93 percent of the click‑throughs.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what happens. [laughter]
Josh: Just kidding. Yeah, those images can be hugely effective with regard to getting users to your site. Rich snippets. Google it. Google talks about it on their blogs and tells you exactly how to implement those.
Matt: Rich snippets. Google it.
Josh: Google it. Or Bing it.
Matt: Or, yeah, search‑engine it.
Josh: Do you ever have that, Matt, where you talk about Google and you feel as though Bing and Yahoo! feel bad because they didn’t get mentioned?
Matt: No.
Josh: I always do.
Matt: [laughs]
Josh: Where I talk, I just feel I have to mention all three search engines.
Matt: Yeah, but, you know. I don’t know. Google is top dog. Regular top of the hill.
Josh: OK, so, the think about this is that when you publish a recipe on the site. I really love the site. But I don’t think that BakeSpace necessarily uses the kind of the social graph that has kind of happened all in the last year. So you can’t post it directly onto Facebook, Twitter, so it doesn’t do any good pinging.
Matt: Yeah, one thing probably good for something like this as soon as the user creates a recipe. For instance, I’m looking at Bubbly Dawn. She has probably a half dozen or so recipes in here. And I’m wondering if, and I’m not sure if it does, but if as soon as you enter a recipe in, if it automatically pings your social profiles. For instance, like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, wherever. And automatically says, “hey, I posted a review. Come check it out. Or not a review, but a recipe. Come check it out.”
That would probably a pretty interesting thing to add here, pretty powerful too. Because you’d be able to spread the word a lot quicker than using Assure This.
Josh: Right. And Facebook has now implemented social graphs, so you can integrate a lot of Facebook’s features. And it’s kind of a weird thing to think about, like a social website, a social networking site like BakeSpace using tools and other social networking sites like Facebook. But, to be honest, my God, Facebook is so big. You might as well. So, one of the things that I can tell is they are using at the very bottom, you can see that BakeSpace is using the webia toolbar which is a really decent way to encourage user interaction. Anytime I’ve done any testing, product testing, with webia toolbar I haven’t had a whole lot of interaction with it however. Have you tried anything with it Matt?
Matt: Yeah. I’ve tried to install it on a couple sites, and never really had much success with it. But again, I probably don’t have the user base that would probably use this. In all honesty, until you mentioned that, I noticed it probably when we first jumped on here, but I didn’t notice it as we were looking through the site because it just kind of blends in with it.
I’d probably rather put something more, for instance, on a particular recipe page, something a little bit more front and center for the social interaction.
Josh: Yeah, like the “like” button, which is down there but not necessarily something you think about clicking.
Matt: Yeah, I’d want to look at the recipe more on the body page.
Josh: Right. And I think that’s really a smart idea giving people the option to just kind of directly post to their Facebook or Twitter. And I think that’s another thing to mention. To this point, search engine optimization has been all about getting ranked in Google, Bing, and Yahoo! I have to say it. I have to say it. Because I feel bad.
Anyhow, search engine optimization is about getting ranked in the search engines.
And the truth is nowadays, with the way the Internet is going, you have to acknowledge that basically Facebook is a search engine in a sense.
It functions completely differently. As in people don’t go out searching for information, information comes to you. So part of search engine optimization needs to be consideration of usability on sites so that people can give information to their friends because that’s how Facebook works.
Matt: Agreed. And it gives them more opportunities to stick, again, to draw those users in through someone’s social graph, through their social circle of friends. For instance, I mentioned my wife would probably like this site. And if she posted this to her Facebook, I guarantee you she would draw in at least 40 or 50 people who would also enjoy something like this.
Josh: Right, which is what affiliate programs are for, right? [laughs] Wouldn’t it be nice if your wife was being paid to drive users to this site.
Matt: Well, yeah.
Josh: For any of you who are site developers if you want to use Facebook social development plugins, the URL go get there is developers.facebook.com/plugins, and they have a whole bunch of tools that you can use to kind of enter the social graph. To basically to put on your website to help people, encourage people to give their friends your pieces. And in my small amount of testing, I found that basically one click on a “like” button, nets anywhere from three to eight visits. So if you have an entire website, and let’s say you have 1,000 pages, all getting liked everyday, by one person, that’s an extra what? Three days. Eight thousand visitors.
So it can be really significant if you have a website that has a large enough user base to use these tools.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. So you know there is something else about this as well, from a linking perspective, right?
Josh: In your recipes, you can actually post a link of your choosing for anchor text, right. I mean it’s kind of dangerous for them to let you do, right. There is, put a muffin recipe with the anchor text buy Viagra inside of the inscription.
Matt: Yeah. [laughs] Cialis, Viagra recipes type of thing.
Josh: Yeah. Like muffins for a good night. Right?
Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Josh: Muffins for a good night. Ingredient: 12 Viagra pills. But the truth is this site is really neat because they haven’t no‑followed their links. So their links show up in Google’s link graph. And Google give you credit for having them. So if you are a food blogger, get on BakeSpace, and get some links of your choosing for, with anchor texts of your choosing. Like, you want to show up for I don’t know, “teriyaki chicken”. Get on here, and help syndicate a recipe you’ve done and link yourself with the anchor text “teriyaki chicken”.
Matt: Well, this is perfect for, [laughs] , any food industry related websites. There’s tons of them. Food bloggers. Recipe sites. Just little old regular mommy sites. Or whatever. It’s relevant. And it’s popular. The recipes get indexed. It’s do‑follow. It’s clean linking.
Josh: Right. And this is the kind of linking that Google likes. I mean there’s nothing really more to say about it than that. Google loves good links.
Matt: Good relevant links. So, on another segment we were talking about videos and videos syndication optimization, so on, so forth. ComScore actually released data today and according to them YouTube streams an all time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed. On a side note, they released some numbers on videos viewed but, Josh, you are working on something a little more different that’s more geared towards search optimization rather than just general video data, right?
Josh: Yeah, yeah. I’m actually taking a data set of I think it’s about 6,000 large in terms of the number of data points I’m looking at. And I am just taking a look at specific domains that are ranking, and what position that they are ranking in so we can try to figure out how Google is handling video rankings, right?
So the main purpose is so that if someone comes to me and says, “hey, Josh, we have a channel on our website or should we just go with YouTube?” Then I can make a recommendation. But I’m finding, I looked at the comScore data today, and it’s pretty good.
Like, most of my data kind of correlates with their numbers. I would say that I’m pretty excited. I’m pretty excited about this. I’m showing that YouTube basically yeah, occupies the majority of search. But more than that, they occupy the majority of the first three positions in Google’s video search.
Matt: Yeah. And I wonder, too, with that, for instance, in the comScore data, they lists sites like Hulu, Veoh, CBS Interactive. If we removed the sites where they are not necessarily user generated videos, but rather, network type websites or streaming video URLs.
Josh: Well, I would say this, I’m actually surprised by the fact that comScore has Yahoo! Videos posting so high. Just because in my research I found that Yahoo! Videos just rarely show up. It’s pretty amazing. There’s no way. They just don’t seem to be showing up as often as other videos. But I can actually kind of speak to this. If you look at more niche‑type things, so, for example, if you break down video search into categories, like sports, for example, you’re going to see a lot more niche sites, such as NHL.com, NBA.com, occupying positions one through number 20. Right? Whereas, if you put in a search for programs that appear on Hulu, like let’s say you want to watch “Bones,” right? I love “Bones.” [laughs] Your first, I don’t know, three to 10 positions are going to be probably Hulu, or mostly Hulu.
I think Google’s getting pretty good at ranking videos where it’s appropriate, right? Like they’ve always done with search. But I think that not a whole lot of people are using Google’s video‑capture feature, right? They’re not putting video XML sitemaps on their site. They’re not wrapping their videos into their website. People are just generally kind of focused on putting all the videos they make on YouTube. So, as a result, YouTube ends up with all the videos.
Matt: The top spot, yeah. Well, that’s what I’m saying. It’d be interesting to see more of a study on separating those networks from user‑generated and seeing what kind of top spots, generic terms, or odd spots that those user‑generated videos actually show, versus a “Bones” episode or a “Modern Family” episode, or whatever.
Josh: Both good shows.
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: [laughs] I think that’s true. I think that I would like to run a few more experiments, in terms of actually putting some videos into an XML sitemap, right? I would actually like to try to rank a site that maybe doesn’t have the link equity that YouTube has, for a competitive keyword, because YouTube ranks really well for any competitive keyword you throw at it.
Matt: Oh, yeah.
Josh: But, can that be duplicated? That’s, I think, the question. I just don’t think there’s enough people testing this right now to answer that.
Matt: We’ll try to come up with a little bit of study. We’ll post it up on the blog, put their thoughts on it and see what comes out of it.
Josh: Absolutely.
Matt: It’s interesting, especially, for instance, here in my household, we have just general, basic cable. So I think a lot of people, they’re moving away from all the TV channels and paying for cable, especially in a tough economy, that they’re saving. What’s everybody doing? They’re turning to the Internet, sites like Hulu and so on and so forth, to watch their favorite TV shows. There was a study. I’ll have to look it up again. But there was one where people don’t mind waiting a day or two just to be able to watch it online, if it’s free, versus paying for it on cable. And I’ll have to find that again. The whole video on the Internet, it’s huge.
Josh: Yeah. Google’s coming out with Google TV, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: [laughs] That’s going to be crazy.
Matt: The whole thing’s going to swing. The cable companies, I’m sure, are scrambling, trying to work their deals. What was it, Comcast? Or who was it? Viacom? Just lost that lawsuit to Google.
Josh: Yeah, the YouTube deal.
Matt: For one billion dollars. [laughs] That’s pretty big.
Josh: Huge. Although, to be honest, it’s a drop in the bucket for Google, right?
Matt: It is. It is. But at the same time, it shows where a lot of the video’s going online. People are looking online, because they’re spending more time in front of their computers, or just not signing up for cable.
Josh: Speaking of videos, I guess, there’s been an interesting thing going on the last few weeks. You may have heard of it. It’s called the World Cup. Have you been watching?
Matt: I have been watching.
Josh: [laughs] Are you happy that the US has made it through to the second round?
Matt: I watched that game, and I was sitting here. Well, it’s on so early here on the west coast, compared to you guys on the east coast. But it was on so early, I was able to catch the second half of it. In the 91st minute, I think just about everybody peed in their pants a little bit, when the USA scored.
Josh: [laughs]
Matt: Yeah, that was a little crazy. If I had a vuvuzela, I would have been blowing it out the window, for sure.
Josh: A vuvuzela.
Matt: Yeah. [makes buzzing sound]
Josh: [makes buzzing sound] [laughter]
I actually followed the vuvuzela on Twitter this week, Matt.
Matt: I saw that, and I about died. [laughter]
Matt: On Twitter, there is a profile, TheVuvuzelaHorn. Look for that, and then you can read all their Tweets. Pretty original. [laughs]
Josh: [laughs] Every Tweet is completely different. It really is. It’s an amazing Twitter stream. I followed it. It makes me very happy. TheVuvuzelaHorn.
Matt: Yeah. [laughing] I look forward to their Tweets every day. [laughter]
Josh: Speaking of TheVuvuzela horn on Twitter, there have been an awful lot of vuvuzela memes. And if you don’t know, the vuvuzela is that horn that you hear in the background of every World Cup game. It’s the most annoying sound ever.
Matt: It is.
Josh: God, it reminds me of that scene from “Dumb and Dumber…”
Matt: [laughs]
Josh: Where Jim Carrey’s sitting in the car, and he turns to the guy next to him. I don’t remember…
Matt: Jeff Daniels.
Josh: You know what? I haven’t seen that movie in a long time, but anyhow.
Matt: Yeah. The most annoying sound in the world.
Josh: Yeah. And then he did something like this. [shrieks loudly]
Matt: [laughs]
Josh: Right? The vuvuzela horn blows that noise out of the water.
Matt: Is right up there?
Josh: It is the most annoying sound in the world.
Matt: There’s been, [laughs] in the news, a lot of… I guess they originally tried to ban it, or FIFA tried to originally ban it. But somehow it got voted again, so they let them in. And look what happens. [laughter]
Josh: Well, Matt, how has the vuvuzela horn and the World Cup in general affected the way you’ve searched this last week?
Matt: I was looking around, and over on Search Engine Watch there were some good statistics, just leading up to the World Cup, which has grown exponentially as the World Cup has been going on. But there was some numbers that came out, just some general numbers of the searches, of who was searching for what. Obviously, greasy “Cristiano Ronaldo“ accounted for one‑fifth of the World Cup player searches that were going on.
Josh: Greasy?
Matt: I don’t know. To me, he always looks greasy.
Josh: [laughs]
Matt: But I’m sure the women will disagree. He accounted for the majority of the searches that were occurring out on the Internet, for World Cup players. Second place was Brazil’s “Ronaldinho.” He accounted for about 5.6 percent of the searches for players, along with Landon Donovan, with just over four percent. So a lot of people. I don’t know if these numbers were US‑specific. If they were, then the US is obviously catching up with the “footy and the pitch” players. In the past, soccer really hasn’t been a major sport in the US. It’s always baseball, football. But if these are US numbers, then people are becoming more educated on their players.
Josh: Which makes sense, though. The Internet really has blown up since the last World Cup. You’ve been working in this industry for about 100 years, right?
Matt: Yeah. [laughs]
Josh: I remember, about five years ago, I made a video in college. It went as close to viral as possible. I left it there on my personal website, which I had to hand‑code. It was basically a blog. I had it just sitting there, and it got picked up in forums, I think, over the weekend, or over the week. It was an embarrassing video that we put up from my freshman dorm. Over the course of the week, it ended up getting like 2‑, maybe 3‑, 4,000 downloads. Right?
Matt: Wow.
Josh: And everyone in it was so embarrassed. [laughs]
Matt: And that was the 2006 World Cup?
Josh: This was before the World Cup.
Matt: OK.
Josh: This would have been ’04.
Matt: OK.
Josh: But my point. This is before YouTube, any video‑hosting site existed. The way that we are now utilizing the Internet, the way that we’re leveraging search, is incredible. The World Cup thing is, I think, kind of the first time that we’ve ever really seen the full‑scale ‑‑ I hate to say this ‑‑ Web 2.0‑ness of the world. I am sorry I said that. I’m sorry. I am so sorry I said “Web 2.0.”
Matt: But you know it makes it a whole lot easier to be able to find results, schedules, standings.
Josh: Man, in Google’s custom results, what a beautiful idea.
Matt: Yeah. It shows what games are coming up. Which games have ended and the score.
Josh: Which games are playing now.
Matt: Yeah. You can get over to FIFA for standings. It’s just amazing. At the same time, again, it comes back around, is the US becoming more fluent for soccer? What’s going to happen with US soccer after the World Cup?
Josh: Right. And this is probably the first time that we’ll get to watch the Google trend. If the US goes any further than this next round, my guess is, we’ll watch the Google trending, and it will probably increase, increase, increase. But, next World Cup, if we compare this year to next, the next World Cup, I’m guessing….
Matt: 2014.
Josh: Yeah, we are going to see like a 100 percent increase in search over the next four years for US soccer. It’s going to be crazy if this actually catches on. Remember when the women won the World Cup, the first Women’s World Cup?
Matt: Or the Olympics?
Josh: Or the Olympics, yeah. And all of a sudden all the little girls are like, I want to play soccer. And it didn’t happen the boys.
Matt: A huge spike in just activity alone.
Josh: Yeah.
Matt: And so to turn it full circle is to, within search results, the popularity is the search rankings, they gain more visitors, or more searches, is especially good for ecommerce sites. Like gear, and jerseys and whatever. Or news sites even for English league stuff or Europeans. Any of those. Just the whole awareness of it. But I think specifically for World Cup, every four years I think there is probably going to be a dip, obviously. Probably within a year or two there will be a dip in people looking for them.
Josh: Yeah. Absolutely. The other big thing news that I kind of wanted to hit on was the BP oil spill. Which, is a tragedy, but makes some interesting case study in both reputation management and search results.
Matt: I don’t think there’s any digging out of that.
Josh: No.
Matt: [laughs] I don’t think BP is disappearing anytime soon. Imagine if that happened with Exxon, back on the Exxon Valdez. The Internet didn’t exist and everything kind of went under the carpet. Except maybe if you were living up in Alaska. But now, with information as power, it’s able to spread like wildfire. BP unfortunately is in the height of it.
Josh: But you know what Matt, it’s really, really interesting. If I say to you, what is the currency of the Internet? What does Google look for to rank websites? What do you say?
Matt: Fresh content?
Josh: And links. Right?
Matt: Yeah.
Josh: Right. So British Petroleum has put so much content on their site that links are pouring in from everywhere to make sure that people have information. So they may actually sidestep this in the sense that like, people have gone to them for information, which means that they may end of burying the results of a lot of this in search as a result of basically being open and telling everyone what is going on. It’s kind of interesting.
Matt: I think they can try. But I think it’s the disaster itself. It’s going to loom over them. And you know what, technically, to me, it’s the oil rigs’ fault, not BP who was just leasing it. But the oil rig owners. I’m not sure what the company name was but they were the ones actually manning it.
Josh: I thought it was Haliburton.
Matt: Is it.
Josh: It might be Halliburton.
Matt: Well there’s another name to hit the news. I’ll keep my opinions to myself.
Josh: Yeah, you’re going to keep your opinions to yourself? Halliburton may have been, what do you call it, engineering and fixing things. It was owned by Trans Ocean. I’m looking right now. I Googled it. Trans Ocean. I don’t know anything about them other than…yeah. But that will be interesting to watch in terms of how it affects search over the next weeks or two. And they either fix or don’t fix it.
Matt: On a side note, for that BP thing, is, I didn’t even notice, but Drew Bledsoe, who lives here where I live, is apparently an investor in some type of chemical company. where they deal with natural gas leaks and oil spills and create some type of solution for it. I guess he’s been trying to go to bat for them so to speak trying to get that type of a contract which I wouldn’t blame him if he’s an investor in the company. He’s going to push his product.
Josh: Kevin Costner is doing it to.
Matt: Yeah. Everybody is climbing out of the woodwork.
Josh: And actually one of the New Orleans Saints, is auctioning off ‑‑ well not auctioning, but raffling I think it is ‑‑ off his Super Bowl ring and giving proceeds to the clean up.
Matt: Oh, wow.
Josh: So all around, there’s an interesting response. I think that it’s really good. It will be interesting to see what happens just from a search perspective.
Matt: Yeah, I agree, just to see what kind of resolution comes out of it ‑‑ what kind of reputation management happens ‑‑ should be fairly interesting. I just have a feeling BP will be tarnished for quite awhile.
Josh: Yeah, well, they tarnished the shores for quite awhile. Just kidding. I have no opinions. I’m neutral.
Matt: So this week we decided to pick another tool of the week. Last week was Link Assistant. The rank checker. This week we are going to talk about Raven. If you haven’t seen it before you can go to Raven‑SEO-Tools.com. Check it out. It is a paid program. And we’ve been using it for quite awhile now. It’s been pretty good. Josh, what do you think about it?
Josh: Oh, Raven is my favorite tool. Which is exactly what I said about Rank Tracker. To be honest, there are a lot of tools online that I really love, right. My top three are the Rank Tracker tool that we talked about last week, Majestic SEO, which I love the little analysis. But you know what, Raven stands out among all the tools that we’ve ever used. Because what it does basically is Raven takes all of the aggregate information that you have in all of these tools. It basically attaches to the API of every imaginable useful tool online. So, it pulls in all the data and it gives you incredibly useful data use.
And one of the best things about the process is that it helps us to create reports. We can spit out term reports and basically see the progress of our link building. Whatever it is. Without doing a whole lot of data gathering.
Matt: Yeah. And there’s just a ton of features on here. Some of them that I really like. Well at first, when you go into the dashboard, you’re there, you can enter your accounts in, your domains in. You can go in and handle all your social information. But from there you can add your competitors. Any type of events. They also have their quality analyzer. They’ve tied in not too long ago with SEM Rush, which is really good tool. Word Tracker, AdWords. They have their link manager, content manager. You can handle all your social stuff from the back‑end here, as far as your personas go. Your search tracker, as far as all your keywords. You can see where you measure up against your competitors for a particular keyword from engine to engine.
Another great thing that I like personally is just being able to pull your Google Analytics data in here. And once you get this set up, you can create a report with report wizard and create branded templates which is really good.
It lets you pick and choose or just sort of cherry pick what you want from Google Analytics. Create sections of your report. Customize it. So on and so forth. And from what I’ve seen from when we first starting using this, I think it was sometime last year, this tool has really evolved.
When we first had access to this, it wasn’t nearly as much of this useful information or useful tool areas as before. It’s really evolved. And I know they’re constantly working on it to add new features.