In terms of a ranking factor, site speed has been in the cards for a while – officially, since Google announced back in 2010 that it had become a consideration in rankings. The question is, how much does site speed affect rankings – and how much should you worry about it? As this post will …

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If you’ve been in the Internet marketing industry for a while, chances are you’ve heard of writer, marketer and consultant Joe Hall. Whether you’ve seen him speak at a conference, read his writing on Marketing Pilgrim or his own blog or had the good luck to spend some time with him in person, you might …

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One of my favorite things about our Research Central tool is how versatile it is. You can use it for just about any SEO task, whether you’re in the keyword research stage or finding link opportunities. One of my favorite uses of Research Central is for competitor analysis. If you remember, a few months ago …

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Raven recently released new social tools, including a completely ravamped Social Monitor (found at Social > Monitor). Powered with data from uberVu, it taps into millions of conversations on more than 20 social networks—including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and WordPress—to display up to 1,000 results per day. To help you receive results relevant to your …

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Now more than ever, your blog’s traffic depends on how much your community shares it. More and more, search engines are looking to reward rankings to the highest quality content, and the best content gets the Tweets, Facebook shares and Google +1′s that the search engines engine take into consideration. So it pays to pay …

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Raven Tools is going to Online Marketing Summit, a global educational event for marketing professionals, Feb. 6-10 in San Diego. And we have a few extra tickets that could be yours! Here’s how to win an All-Access OMS Pass worth more than $1600. Since OMS is one of the first Internet marketing conferences of the …

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What I’ll call the “Great Google Convergence” continued yesterday as Google announced that they would be merging their Google+ (G+) data into personalized search results (aka Search, Plus Your World). On the surface, this appears to be a desperate play by Google to make sure its social networking experiment, G+, gains more traction. However, I …

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“Why are you based in Nashville?” It’s a question we Ravens are asked all the time as we travel to cities like New York, LA and Las Vegas for Internet marketing conferences. We’re pretty used to it by now. Obviously, Nashville isn’t a tech hub like Silicon Valley, nor does it have the concentrated media …

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I love data. I’m particularly fascinated by what you can learn in your website’s analytics to help improve both your marketing and your user’s experience. For both Raven Tools and my personal websites, I’ve always turned to Google Analytics. What I don’t love is how difficult it is to figure out how to customize Google …

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Researching the number of keywords your website has in common with your competitors is helpful. Being able to see what those keywords are is even better. That’s why Raven’s domain comparison report provides this and more. To create the report, go to Research > Websites > Research Assistant, enter your website’s URL in the Domain …

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