Everyday it seems like a new SEO tool or toolset is launching.
I’ve been quite impressed with the improvements and enhancements to Raven’s SEO Tools since they launched. There are so many features in Raven but I want to focus on some of the really unique ones which make Raven a must have for me.
Link Research Tools
Raven has 2 powerful, time-saving tools in their Link Research toolset. Site Finder and Backlink Explorer are 2 tools that really help me quickly assess and work through link profiles and the link landscape of a particular keyword.
Sigh, not this again. 
Recently Rand highlighted his surprise at how prevalent search spam is. But the big issue with search today is not the existence of spam, but how it is dealt with. For a long period of time Google spent much of their resources fighting spam manually. That worked when spammers were sorta poor and one hit wonders fighting on the edge of the web & few people knew how search worked. But as technology advances & “spammers” keep building a bigger stock of capital eventually Google loses the manual game.
Marketing generally has 2 core strategies in terms of customers: finding new customers & keeping your current/old customers happy. The best businesses tend to keep the interest of their customers for months and years through consistently improving their products and services to deliver more value. Whereas the other sorts of businesses tend to be hard-close / hype driven & always promoting a new product / software / scheme. It is never a complete system being sold, but some “insider secret” shortcut that unearths millions automatically while you sleep – perpetually.
This past week, Matt Bailey, the president and founder of SiteLogic, Cindy Krum, the Chief Executive Officer of Rank-Mobile, and I taught half a dozen of the modules in the Rutgers Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing certificate program. Rutgers incorporated “cutting-edge digital technology” into our teaching approach for this program – supplying all participants with their own free Apple iPad tablet, containing the pre-loaded program materials.
Now, the 30 participants in my two modules seemed to like their iPads. But when I was finished teaching the Online PR Strategies and Social Media Marketing modules, I returned the Apple iPad tablet that I’d been loaned for the program to Rutgers University.
If you scour the rates and registration details for SES San Francisco, you’ll find something that I haven’t seen before. There’s group pricing for 4-6 passes, 7-9 passes, 10-19 passes, 20-29 passes, and 30+ passes.
And over on the page about pricing for Connected Marketing Week, you’ll find that special pricing is available for groups of 4 or more. Hey, I’m not making this up.
So, are people seriously planning to attend these events by the carload and busload?
You betcha.
In fact, Jeff Sponseller and Dominic Golembiewski of Miller Weldmaster brought 4 people to SES Chicago 2009. Here’s what they had to say:
Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have confirmed that they will start testing the Bing algorithm live on some Yahoo! traffic this month. One of the big questions from the SEO perspective is what happens to Yahoo! Site Explorer? If it goes away then webmasters will need to get link data from web indexes built by SEO companies, perhaps either Open Site Explorer and/or Majestic SEO.
Yahoo! also offers a link: search in their BOSS program. While they have stated that the BOSS program will live on, there is little chance of the link: operator working in it over the longrun as Bing has disabled inbound link search on Bing.
Open source software is awesome, and I am much richer for it existing. But the concepts that work in widely downloaded free software may not apply as well elsewhere. One of the best books on this topic is Jason Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget, which in large part inspired this post.
Openness is one of the most widely espoused important ideals upon which to build an online business. The reasons it is preached so heavily are
- anything that is free doesn’t have to get over the penny gap, so it is easy to gain traction when compared against paid alternatives
In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn’t tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location.
Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities
Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more “move on please” rather than “let’s go!” types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign.
Competition is usually a good thing, it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to “Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47.”
I just read a WSJ article about how some hotel chains are trying to woo people leaving negative remarks publicly about their brand.
‘I Hate My Room,’ The Traveler Tweeted. Ka-Boom! An Upgrade!
Generally speaking, the idea is crap.
In essence they are spending resources trying to make the most unsatisfied segment of their market happy, and rewarding people for trashing their brands with free upgrades & other perks. And so it teaches more people to complain & to find arbitrary things to complain about. Hence the friendly article offering the tip on how to get free room upgrades, with tips like: “Have a lot of online friends or followers. Hotels will pay more attention to your requests.”
