Some days that progress goes towards bigger projects that we announce here, but sometimes it goes towards tiny enhancements that you may not even notice.

Many of those smaller enhancements come directly from our customers, which we love. We make this software for you, not ourselves. With that in mind, I wanted to showcase a few of our recent enhancements that have come directly from users…

SEO metrics column sorting

When we introduced SEO performance reports to Raven, there were lots of great SEO metrics to analyze – but you could not sort the data.

Many requests came in to be able to sort the tables by the metric of your choice, and now you can! A simple click on the header of the column will sort by that particular metric, and you can do this in either direction.

Removing filtered keywords from PDF reports

For years now, you’ve been able to filter certain data out of Google Analytics reports, which many customers use to filter out branded keywords, (not provided), etc.

In the past, Raven displayed those keywords at the top of the PDF report so you can always see what was omitted.

Turns out that was not optimal for many users, and they requested a way to remove that label from the PDF reports. Now it’s as simple as ticking a box, which will remove the text from the PDF that I’ve highlighted above.

Removing sentiment from Social Monitor PDF reports

Social Monitor is a powerful reputation management tool that assigns sentiment automatically to every single post it captures.

But sometimes you may your client to focus on the number and content of mentions – not the sentiment.

With that in mind, you can now turn sentiment off from the PDFs, If you do, you’ll no longer see the number of positive/neutral/negative mentions, nor will you see the color coding in the table below.

Color coding events

You can now assign colors to any events you’ve created in the Event Manager. This is another perfect example of feature requests from many users that may feel like a small enhancement, but make so many people’s jobs that much easier.

What’s your Raven wish?

So many of you we get to talk with face-to-face at many of the events and conferences we attend, and we love that. Others email us their feedback or use our feature request form. However you like to talk to us, it’s always appreciated.

I personally consider every single request we receive, and no request is too small.

My inbox is always open, and I’d love to hear any enhancement, small or big, that could make your life a little easier. Enhancements make us happy because they let us make you happy.

Photo Credit: jetheriot via Compfight cc

The post Enhancements make us happy appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Raven builds in metrics and reporting features into our Twitter integration to make all of this easy.

Here’s everything you need to know to understand Raven’s Twitter metrics.

How to authorize a Twitter account

First, you will need to have a Twitter account authorized in Raven. You can authorize an account from a few different spots in Raven.

From the Dashboard module, simply click the Set Up Twitter button from the Twitter module. The system will take you to Social > Twitter.

From Social > Twitter, click the Add Twitter Account button. You will be asked to enter your Twitter credentials and authorize Raven to access your data.

If you already have an account authorized under a website, you can add another one. You can have multiple Twitter accounts authorized under a website. From the accounts drop-down menu, select Manage Accounts.

This action will take you to the list of Twitter accounts that you have authorized already. Click the Add Twitter Account button to start the process.

It takes 24 hours from the time your Twitter account is authorized for the data to populate. At that point we will start compiling your data. (Due to the limitations of the API we are not able to pull in historical data.)

Where to view Twitter metrics

Twitter metrics can be viewed in several locations across the toolset:

From the Dashboard

Individual Twitter account module

Raven offers a quick overview of one Twitter account with this module. It always displays data for the last 30 days.

All Accounts Twitter module

If you have more than one Twitter account authorized under a particular website, you can  add the All Accounts module, which will display the number of followers, friends and posts for each authorized account.

Social > Twitter

On Raven’s main Twitter activity page, you’ll find some top-line metrics to give you an idea of how your account is doing at a glance.

By default, the metrics compare current numbers with those from the previous month, displaying the percentage change.

You can select the date range of your choice – or remove these figures altogether – by clicking the Statistics button on the top right.

Metrics > Twitter

In the Metrics tab, you’ll find the most in-depth Twitter metrics Raven offers. (Makes sense, huh?)

These Twitter metrics correspond to any date range you select from the date picker. (If you don’t choose one, we default to the past 30 days.)

Here’s a breakdown of what all the metrics mean:

• Following: The number of user feeds to which the Twitter account subscribes.
• Followers: The number of users who subscribe to the Twitter account’s feed.
• Total mentions: Total number of tweets that included the Twitter account’s username. Total Mentions is the sum of all Replies, Retweets and Other Mentions.
• Retweet reach: Maximum number of Twitter users potentially exposed to a retweet from this Twitter account.
• Posts: Number of tweets posted by this Twitter account.
• Replies: Number of @ replies posted by this Twitter account to other Twitter users.
• Reply reach: Maximum number of users potentially exposed to a reply to this Twitter account.
• Retweets: Number of retweets posted by this Twitter account, sharing other users’ tweets.
• Follower/Following ratio: The ratio of followers to following for this Twitter account, expressed in decimals. If the account has more followers than it’s following, this number will be greater than 1. If the account has fewer followers than it’s following, this number will be less than 1.
• Visits: The total number of visits to your website where Twitter is the referring domain. This data comes from Google Analytics.

You’ll also see a graph that plots the account’s total posts and mentions. Any events that users might add to the Event Manager will be shown on the graph, too, to help you make sense of the effects of your Twitter activity on a campaign.

Here’s a breakdown of what these metrics mean:

• Posts: Number of tweets posted by this Twitter account.
• Mentions: Number of tweets that include the Twitter account’s username.

You can dissect this data further by choosing a specific section from the menu at left: Mentions, Connections and Referral Traffic.

Mentions

Mentions is the number of tweets that includes the Twitter account’s username. The total number of mentions is the sum of all Replies, Retweets and Other Mentions. The graph displays this information for your selected date range.

• Replies: Number of @ replies posted by this Twitter account to other accounts
• Retweets: Number of retweets made by this Twitter account, sharing other users’ tweets.
• Other mentions: Number of mentions that include this Twitter account’s username but are not @replies or retweets.

Connections

The connections graph shows the associations you have made with your Twitter account, by displaying the number of Followers and Following.

• Following: The number of user feeds to which the Twitter account subscribes.
• Followers: The number of users who subscribe to the Twitter account’s feed.

Referral traffic

If you have authorized your Google Analytics account, Raven will pull in referral data from twitter.co, or t.co, and display the number of visits for a given date range with Twitter as the referrer.

How to generate a report with Twitter data

Once you have authorized your account and compiled your data, you can generate a report. In Social > Twitter or Metrics > Social (Twitter), simply click the Build Report icon on the top right of the page to create a quick PDF.

To add your Twitter data to a more comprehensive report you can schedule, navigate to Reports > Wizard and from the Social tab select the Twitter module. Be sure to choose the Twitter account you would like to report on.

How to understand your Twitter report

In the PDF report, you’ll see a graph that includes number of posts, replies, retweets, followers, following and follower/following ratio. In the middle of the page you’ll see a pie chart focusing on your connections, showing retweets, replies and other mentions percentages.

The key performance indicator table displays metrics for the date range and a percentage change from the previous date range.

The post Did you know? How to understand Twitter metrics appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

With average position, you can get real information on where people are finding your domain in Google searches. No guessing based on scraped data, no hoping that people are searching in private mode in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle to get the least affected results possible.

Average position factors all of that information in and gives you a reasonable estimate of your organic opportunities.

But it can be a little trickier than the average tool to set up. Let’s break down exactly how to get GWT working in your account.

Prepare your GWT account

Fully authorizing Google Webmaster Tools in Raven is a two-step process. Before you open your Raven account, follow these steps to grant Raven access to your GWT account:

1. Navigate to google.com/webmasters and log into your Google account.
2. For the domain that you’re trying to authorize, click the Settings button and choose the Add or Remove Users option.
3. On this page, click Add a New User.
   
4. Enter gwt@raventools.com and give this new user restricted (not full) access.
   
5. Repeat for as many accounts as you plan to authorize

The reason why we ask for you to add Raven as a user on your websites in GWT is because we’re essentially exporting the Top Searches data as a user, then importing it into Raven for parsing. This is a process that is recommended by Google – we’re just taking advantage of the capabilities of automating the data collection.

If you’d prefer not to give Raven access in this way, you can still see data like crawl errors and related keywords by following the next steps. You just won’t be able to get Top Searches data.

Authorize your GWT account

Now that you’ve prepared your Google Webmaster Tools account for integrating with Raven, follow these instructions to pull all of your GWT data into Raven:

1. Log into your Raven account and navigate to Site > Webmaster.
2. On this page, add a new account if you haven’t added it already. Be sure to grant Raven access on the next page and name your new Google Account.

Once you’ve authorized your Google Account, your GWT account should automatically connect. Keep in mind that it can take about 10 minutes for Raven to pull data from Top Searches into your account.

That’s it! But, there are a couple of caveats to be aware of that can cause the authorization process to go awry.

A couple of caveats

• Google is very particular about verifying websites. Let’s say that we’ve added www.raventools.com to our Raven account, but verified raventools.com in our Google Webmaster Tools account. One would think that these two would see each other when authorizing GWT, but that isn’t the case. The websites in both Raven and GWT must have the exact same URL. Google recommends that you add both versions – with and without the www subdomain – to your account.
• When authorizing your Google Account, you may see a warning stating that the website has not registered with Google. Because Google registers websites on a domain by domain basis, it isn’t feasible to register every domain with their system – due in part to the custom domain features offered. Don’t worry, you can trust us.

That’s about it! If you have any questions or concerns, shoot us an email at support@raventools.com.

The post Did you know? How to authorize Google Webmaster Tools in Raven appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

That’s why we’ve enhanced your options to get alerts to your Raven inbox.

Not only have we updated our existing alerts for link monitoring and social media monitoring, we’ve also added enhanced alerts for Site Auditor and will soon be adding Site Performance and Dashboard alerts.

Here’s what’s new and on the way.

Updated link monitoring and social monitoring alerts

From the Link Manager, you can activate link monitoring alerts for a whole host of options. For example, if you are running a link building campaign and want to know when a link you’re working on goes active, Raven pops a little note into your inbox to tell you that.

Alerts for Social Monitor let you know when terms you are monitoring have had mentions.

But previously, these alerts were text-based and hard to sift through. Now, everything is organized and easy to digest, so you can quickly act on the things that are the most urgent.

Enhanced Site Auditor alerts

Already one of Raven’s most robust tools, Site Auditor is now even more indispensable with the addition of info-packed emails sent to your inbox every time a crawl is run.

Get alerted to any changes that have been detected for your website and get right to work – the email’s got everything you need to get going.

In Site Auditor, you have an option to run crawls monthly, weekly, or manually as you need them. You’ll get an alert email every time Raven crawls your site, so you’ll be able to see changes over time as multiple crawls are run.

If you automate a crawl monthly or weekly, you’ll get an email alert any time a crawl has completed.

If you set up Site Auditor to run manual crawls on command, you’ll receive these alerts once the crawl has been completed. Having the changes over time sent right to your inbox is a quick and easy reminder that there are still on-site issues that need some attention.

In the sneak peek category, get a look at our upcoming alerts for Site Performance and Dashboards.

On the way: Site Performance alerts

Imagine having an update in your inbox every two weeks that tells you how your website is performing in more than 20 different internet marketing metrics, and notes change over time on all those metrics.

Site Performance updates automatically every two weeks, so when you turn on these alerts, you’ll get them automatically.

Coming soon: Dashboard alerts

I know lots of you will be even more excited about our upcoming Dashboard alerts. Triggered at an interval of your choosing (daily, weekly or monthly), the Dashboard alert will mimic the exact view you have set up in the individual site’s Dashboard.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – there are so many directions we hope to go from here in terms of alerts. What would you most like to see?

As always, we love to hear your feedback.

The post Feature update: Actionable alerts on links, site changes and more appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

If you are responsible for even more than one client, it’s probably not unusual for you to find yourself in a time crunch to produce the amount of content you need to keep everyone happy.

That’s where Raven comes in. Our integration with the content firm Textbroker is here to help you get your hands on all the quality content you need to keep up with your workload.

At a glance

Raven integration: Textbroker
Category: Content
What it does: Writers are at your disposal to assist you in producing content on a myriad of topics.
Where you’ll find it: Content > Textbroker
What else it connects to: Review, edit and publish content directly from Textbroker to any WordPress-powered blog via Raven’s Blog Manager.

Get to know Textbroker

Textbroker employs a bevy of qualified writers to assist you in content production on just about any topic you might need. The content producers are all located in the United States, and Textbroker verifies all produced content to ensure it is completely original.

Get started with Textbroker

To use the Textbroker service integrated within Raven, you’ll first need to request Textbroker access. Since Textbroker is an add-on service to your Raven account, we do this simply to protect everyone from credit card fraud. Just navigate to Content > Textbroker, and you’ll see how to start the process.

Once you’ve been granted Textbroker access, you can order content anytime. Just click on Order Article in the Textbroker section, and you’ll be taken to an order form where you can fill in details about the article you want, including specifying content category, title, word count, keywords and more.

After you place your order, it is placed into a pool for a Textbroker author to pick up. Once an author picks up your request, they have 24 hours to submit it for your review. You can follow along in the status column of the table to see the progress of your article (see all the status types and their definitions here in our Knowledge Base).

After an article is delivered from the Textbroker author, it will be available in the Content Manager, where you can run a Scribe analysis, make any edits and send it to the Blog Manager for publishing.

Good to know

Textbroker content is not included in your monthly Raven fee, but an additional cost billed along with your monthly Raven invoice.

The fee per article depends on the word count you’ve specified, and your estimated total will display before you order the content so there are no surprises.

Previously in Raven’s data partner and integration spotlight

• Quick and easy blog management with WordPress
• Social media monitoring and management with Twitter
• Scribe content analysis
• Majestic SEO data
• uberVU social media intelligence
• Google Webmaster Tools SEO and site data

The post Raven integration spotlight: Order quality content from Textbroker appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Create a new list, or add folks to an existing one – all while working in Raven. Here’s how.

Create a Twitter list

1. Go to Social > Twitter and connect an account if you haven’t already.

2. Click Lists from the menu on the left.

3. From here, we’ll show you any existing lists that are associated with this account. Click the Create List button.

4. Now give your new list a name and description. By default, your list will be public on Twitter, but simply switch the toggle to Private if you want to create a list only you can see. Click Submit.

That’s it! Your list is now live.

Now, here’s how to add someone to an existing Twitter list.

Add a user to Your Twitter list

1. From the Twitter tool, select “Add or remove from lists…” from the gear icon next to a tweet..

2. Select the list(s) to which you want to add the user and click Submit.

3. To view your lists, just click Lists from the menu on the left.

You may also want to learn about creating Twitter searches in Raven – another convenient feature.

Enjoy this handy feature to help build relationships while you’re working on other tasks in Raven!

The post Did you know? Create Twitter lists in Raven appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

This feature allowed me to simply manage the 40+ blogs I was responsible for. I didn’t have to remember all the usernames and passwords for each account. All I had to do was choose my website and profile within Raven and publish to all of those blogs in one place.

Today, Raven’s WordPress integration gives all of our customers that same value: An easy way to publish to as many WordPress blogs as you need. (OK, a lot more value, actually: You can order quality content with Textbroker, test your content with Scribe…)

Here’s what you need to know about Raven’s integration with WordPress.

At a glance

Data integration: WordPress
Category: Content
What it does: Allows users to quickly publish blog content.
Where you’ll find it: Content > Blog Manager
What else it connects to: Analyze content with Scribe in the Content Manager, then send posts directly to integrated WordPress blogs.

Get to know WordPress

Open source software at its core, WordPress allows anyone to manage the content on a website. Coupled with thousands of plugins, WordPress allows just about anyone to get a complete website up and running and manage it with ease.

Get started with WordPress

To connect your WordPress blog to Raven, navigate to Content > Blog Manager. Click the “Add Blog” button in the top right corner to start the process of adding your blog. In the first pop-up window, add the full URL of the blog. In the next, you’ll be able to add more details, such as the username and password for the blog.

If you want to limit access to the blog to just the admins of your Raven account, you can do that. Or you can make the blog accessible across your entire Raven account.

Once done, you’ll be taken back to a table where you can see all of the blog’s draft and previously published posts.

To add a new post, just click on the “Add Post” button in the top right of the table. From there, you’ll be taken to a simple WYSIWYG editor where you can add any content you would like to the blog in question. You can publish right way, or schedule a post date and time of your choosing.

Once you publish a new piece of content, you’ll be returned to the table with all of your previous blog posts. You can add a new post, add a new blog, or edit the settings right from the same page.

Good to know

You can add an unlimited number of WordPress blogs to Raven, so take advantage of the ultimate way to keep all your content organized in one place.

Previously in Raven’s data partner and integration spotlight

• Social media monitoring and management with Twitter
• Scribe content analysis
• Majestic SEO data
• uberVU social media intelligence
• Google Webmaster Tools SEO and site data

The post Raven integration spotlight: Manage blogs easily with WordPress appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

At some point in your link building process, I am sure you have had the need to change a link’s destination URL, anchor text or perhaps something else.

If you keep all your links in Raven’s Link Manager, editing a link is easy.

We’ll over the process with a real example. Search News Central recently reviewed our new resource, 30 Social Media Metrics That Prove Real Value (thanks, guys!). Let’s check out that link.

Accessing the link record

From the main Link Manager view, there are two ways to see the link record for any link you want to edit. Click on the link’s status, or click the gear icon next to the link record and select Edit Link Record from the drop-down menu.

Editing the link record

A pop-up window will display, giving you access to edit your record.

In the window you will see three tabs: General, Description and Contact.

General

Under this section you can edit link options and related information, as well as website information.

• Link Options: Make changes to those fields directly tied to your link: Status, Type, Kind, Owner or even the date the link was first created or Created On.
• Website Info: Make changes to Website URL and Website Type. The URL is the website where your link is, or will be, live. Type will help you identify the type of link you are building.
• Link Information: This section refers to the link that points to your site. Change your anchor text or destination URL.

Description Tab

When you first add a link in Raven, you can add a description of the link for yourself or your teammates, or even tie content from the Content Manager to a specific link.

If this information changes once the link has been created, you can open the Description tab and add or edit it.

Contact

The Contact tab ties directly into Raven’s CRM, or contact relationship manager.

You can create a new contact, view any related contacts that match up with the website your link is from, or discover new contacts that relate to your link record.

Other Changes

There are also some modifications you can make when viewing a link record.

If you click the gear icon next to the website URL at the top of the link record table, you can customize the metrics displayed at the top. Use the drop-down menu to choose your favorite 8 metrics from a menu of 30+ site, authority, social and keyword metrics.

General link option attributes like Link Type, Status and Owner can also be quickly changed from the Summary tab with a drop-down menu of options. You can create new link types and statuses here, too.

You can also add, edit or delete any notes that have been created under a given link can from the main Summary page.

To edit the date of any part of the link-building process, navigate to the History tab. Click the gear icon next to any status and select Edit Date. The window displayed will allow you to choose a date.

Happy link building!

The post Did you know? How to edit a link record appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Most recently, we added the ability to exclude errors and specific paths, allowing you to fine-tune your crawl so that you’re only notified about issues important to your specific goals.

Let’s go through both of these new exclusion options in detail.

Website path exclusions

In some instances, you’ll want to exclude certain parts of your site from being crawled.

For example, WordPress creates separate archive pages for each tag and category you use on your site. When you apply multiple tags or categories to a post, that post appears on the archive page for each. And when Site Auditor crawls the site, it picks up on this as duplicate content.

Since you know this isn’t an issue to be concerned about, you can stop Site Auditor from crawling these tag and category archives by setting up a Website Path Exclusion. To do this, go to Site > Auditor and click on the wrench icon to get to Settings.

In the Website Path Exclusions section, click the “Create New Exclusion” button.

You can exclude various paths from the crawl, but for this example we’ll exclude all category pages on the Raven blog from being crawled and will enter /category/* for our exclusion.

Adding the asterisk after category/ tells Site Auditor to ignore the URL raventools.com/blog/category and all folders and files below it, like raventools.com/blog/category/seo/ and raventools.com/blog/category/raven/.

Click the “Create New Exclusion” button, and your exclusion will be saved. Going forward, Site Auditor will no longer crawl URLs according to your exclusions.

If you ever change your mind and want Site Auditor to start crawling those excluded URLs again, just go back to the Website Path Exclusions section in Settings and delete one or all of the exclusions you created.

Error exclusions

If Site Auditor reports certain issues that you already know about but don’t consider a problem, or don’t want to report to your client, you can exclude them from your total number of issues and from showing up on the summary sub-tabs of Site Auditor.

For example, let’s say that you have your robots.txt file set up to block login pages, or maybe your 404 error page, from being crawled. The first time Site Auditor crawls your site, seeing these URLs in your report is probably a helpful reminder. But if you don’t want this information to be factored into your total crawl issues going forward, you can exclude this metric from future crawls.

To do this, go into Site Auditor > Settings (the wrench icon again), and find the Exclude Errors from Report section. From the drop-down, select “Pages blocked by robots.txt” and then save.

Immediately after saving, “Pages blocked by robots.txt” will no longer appear on the Summary tab under Visibility Issues, and the number of issues related to this metric will no longer count toward the total number of issues reported for your site.

You will still be able to find metrics for the errors you’ve excluded under the main tabs, in case you want to check in from time to time to make sure nothing has gone awry with your site.

If you haven’t crawled your site yet, now’s a great time to get started and try out these new features. let us know what you think!

The post Did you know? How to set up exclusions in Site Auditor appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

So they were due for a good facelift – and this week we’ve given them just that. You’ll notice the sections are more consistent with your overall Raven experience, the graphs are easier to digest, and data is more logically grouped together.

Here’s a quick tour of what’s new.

Facebook metrics

Facebook Insights data is one of our customers’ favorite features. This integration has always offered a lot of data for marketers, but that data wasn’t always easy to interpret. So the best part of our social metrics update is the new charts and graphs that simplify all that fantastic Facebook data to present an easy-to-understand view of how well your Facebook marketing is performing.

All of the data you know and love from Facebook is still here – it’s just easier to digest. The sub-navigation now expands on the left side of the screen to keep data better grouped together, and our new color-coded events in Event Manager really shine through here.

The graphs are also extremely dynamic. Want to isolate the data to just a few data points? Anytime you see a graph with the colored dot key on the top right, you can click any dot on the key to add or remove that data point.

You’ll see the graphs scale out to display exactly what you want to see. Go ahead, give it a try. I know you’ll have just as much fun as I did.

Twitter and YouTube

We also included Twitter and YouTube in the overhaul. All the same great data is there, but now it’s easier to navigate. Within any of the summary metrics areas, just click the gear icon in the top right hand corner, and you can add or remove any metrics to personally customize your view.

We hope that these updates to our social media metrics make your life just a bit easier as you work in Raven. As always, we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the update, and what you’d like to see next.

The post New look for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube metrics appeared first on Raven Internet Marketing Tools.