NEW! Raven by TapClicks - SEO + SEM Tools with Deeper Competitive Insights

GET STARTED FREE External Link Tap Click Logo Tap Click Logo

The Raven Blog

We write tips for digital marketers and we create beginner through advanced guides for search engine optimization. Improve your SEO and Content Marketing game.

🎨 UI & UX Updates Make Raven Even Better!

Written by and published

🌩️ Should you AMP?

Written by and published

⤿ Majestic Adds Full 301 Redirect Reporting

Written by and published

🌆 Cheating on Social Media (Images) Should Be Simple

Written by and published

📊 Facebook Ads Reporting now in Raven

Written by and published

🔒 How to easily add SSL and HTTP/2 to your site for free

Written by and published

📈 How to remove Google Analytics Referral Spam

Written by and published

📱 Improve your Mobile UX with these Form Input Data Types

Written by and published

⏰ Why you should expire your blog posts

Written by and published

How to fix the most common AMP error in WordPress

Written by and published

How to use SRCSET for SEO and UX

Written by and published

Learn Which On-Page SEO Issues Hold Back The Average Website

Written by and published

Market Motive: Online Marketing Training at its Best

Written by and published

The easy way to find duplicate content on your site

Written by and published

Tips for Getting E-commerce SEO Right

Written by and published

How To Stop Referrer Spam

Written by and published

8 Must Have WordPress Plugins

Written by and published

How To Create Your Own URL Shortener With YOURLS

Written by and published

SSL ALL THE THINGS with WordPress and AWS CloudFront

Written by and published

The Best Way To Measure Reader Engagement

Written by and published

Posts written by Jon Henshaw

🎨 UI & UX Updates Make Raven Even Better!
By Jon Henshaw

October, 2017

🎨 UI & UX Updates Make Raven Even Better!

The past several months we’ve asked our customers a lot of questions (perhaps you were one of them). We also studied which features they use the most, and took note of the ones they use the least. After we crunched and analyzed all of the data, the results showed us a clear path for changes […]


🌩️ Should you AMP?
By Jon Henshaw

🌩️ Should you AMP?

AMP We’ve turned the Web into a UX mess. Our sites are slow and they’re loaded with crappy ads that are desperate to get our attention. Google finally took notice and now they’re punishing us for it. That punishment has come in the form of Accelerated Mobile Pages, aka AMP. AMP requires webmasters to make […]


⤿ Majestic Adds Full 301 Redirect Reporting
By Jon Henshaw

July, 2017

⤿ Majestic Adds Full 301 Redirect Reporting

Majestic recently updated their algorithm to display 301 redirects for referring domains. Raven has also updated the Backlink Explorer to support displaying this new data. To view it, check the table display options for Indirect Target URL and Indirect Target Type. The table results will then display the new data columns. I wanted to learn more […]


By Jon Henshaw

July, 2017

🌆 Cheating on Social Media (Images) Should Be Simple

I’m currently working with the TapClicks marketing team to create the Ultimate Content Marketing Guide. It’s an ambitious project and we just published the first section on Social Media. One of the objectives of the project is to repurpose the longform content into different mediums and formats. For example, we plan to create presentations, videos […]


Facebook Ads
By Jon Henshaw

July, 2017

📊 Facebook Ads Reporting now in Raven

I’m happy to announce that you can now report on Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad-level data for all of your Facebook Ads campaigns within Raven. Campaign: This is the level of data you could see previously in Raven Tools. Because we’ve added other levels of metrics, the Campaign view is now on its own tab. […]


Free SSL and HTTP2
By Jon Henshaw

January, 2017

🔒 How to easily add SSL and HTTP/2 to your site for free

Google really wants Webmasters and SEOs to make their sites secure and faster. There’s just one problem…it’s not easy to do. Adding an SSL certificate is still expensive and difficult to install. While speeding up a site can be even more complicated and usually requires a lot of coding changes. In my pursuit to solve […]


GA Referral Spam
By Jon Henshaw

January, 2017

📈 How to remove Google Analytics Referral Spam

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics (GA) referral spam, it’s because you’ve never looked closely at your GA results. Referral spam has been notorious for several years and it’s a constant frustration for marketers who have to provide analytics reports to their clients. Even more frustrating is Google’s lack of action to prevent it. […]


Data Type Tel
By Jon Henshaw

January, 2017

📱 Improve your Mobile UX with these Form Input Data Types

One of the most frustrating experiences a person can have on their phone is filling out a form. That’s because most web developers and designers don’t optimize their forms for mobile users. It ends up that optimizing forms for mobile users is quite simple. All it takes is changing the data type for the input […]


Old Post
By Jon Henshaw

January, 2017

⏰ Why you should expire your blog posts

Company blogs get used for a variety of purposes that are well beyond the purview of helpful, high quality content. They’re used for product updates, conferences and events, new hires, contests, webinars and much more. Here’s a good example of the kind of post I’m talking about. Those type of posts are typically thin on […]


Add Site Icon
By Jon Henshaw

August, 2016

How to fix the most common AMP error in WordPress

The AMP plugin for WordPress makes it incredibly easy to support AMP pages on your blog. However, there’s a common structured data validation error for AMP that many blogs experience. That error is “A value for the logo field is required.” This can be fixed by adding a Site Icon in the Site Identity settings […]


Mobile and Desktop SRCSET Examples
By Jon Henshaw

November, 2015

How to use SRCSET for SEO and UX

There’s a newly standardized HTML attribute used with the IMG element called SRCSET. It’s kind of a big deal because it allows webmasters to display different images based on a device’s screen size without the need for JavaScript or other special code. That means mobile browsers can be served the smaller images, thus speeding up their […]


5 Most Common On-Page SEO Issues
By Jon Henshaw

October, 2015

Learn Which On-Page SEO Issues Hold Back The Average Website

SEO strategies and tactics have changed over the years as search engines like Google continue to tweak their search algorithms. However, what hasn’t changed is the need to fix and optimize sites.


market motive training
By Jon Henshaw

May, 2015

Market Motive: Online Marketing Training at its Best

In a previous article mentioning Market Motive, I wrote that I’d be happy to write a review if granted access. Well, Market Motive took me up on that offer and gave me free access to their service for a full month. This was soon after they launched and the quality of their program has only […]


The easy way to find duplicate content on your site
By Jon Henshaw

March, 2015

The easy way to find duplicate content on your site

Raven’s Site Auditor now supports canonicalization! The new canonical tag support works in conjunction with our preexisting duplicate content check. Learn how our tool analyzes pages for duplicate content and how the new feature enhances those results.


Tips for Getting E-commerce SEO Right
By Jon Henshaw

March, 2015

Tips for Getting E-commerce SEO Right

Most e-commerce sites compete with behemoths like Amazon, eBay or Target. It’s essential that new B2C websites start off with all the advantages they can to counter big brands and big budgets. We wanted to share the advice Raven’s President Jon Henshaw gave in an interview last year. Below, we have republished PrestaShop’s article, part of their SEO Experts series.


Attack of the Referrer Spam
By Jon Henshaw

February, 2015

How To Stop Referrer Spam

Update – January 12, 2017: There’s a new post about how to remove Google Analytics referral spam that addresses new types of spam and includes resources for stopping it. Referrer spam is becoming a problem. If you’re not familiar with referrer spam, it’s traffic from bots that impersonate a referral link. The pseudo traffic is […]


Must have WordPress Plugins
By Jon Henshaw

January, 2015

8 Must Have WordPress Plugins

When it comes to WordPress, I like to use as few plugins as possible. As WordPress has improved, I’ve been able to drop many of the plugins I’ve used. However, the number of plugins I continue to use and recommend has actually stayed about the same. That’s because each new year brings new vulnerabilities and […]


Shorten URL
By Jon Henshaw

September, 2014

How To Create Your Own URL Shortener With YOURLS

Earlier this year, I wrote about why link shorteners matter for content marketing. In the article, I mentioned how there’s no longer a need to shorten links for social networks like Twitter, but there’s still a need to shorten them in order to get campaign insights using Campaign Variables. The most widely used URL shortener […]


Wordpress CloudFront SSL
By Jon Henshaw

August, 2014

SSL ALL THE THINGS with WordPress and AWS CloudFront

Update 2/21/2018:  Since we wrote this piece in 2014, there’s actually an easier way to add SSL and HTTP/2 using Cloudflare instead of CloudFront. The instructions from the one you just did are too difficult for me to easily troubleshoot for you, but this new method is fairly straighforward & free!  Before I begin, let’s […]


Engaged Reader
By Jon Henshaw

July, 2014

The Best Way To Measure Reader Engagement

For most content and affiliate marketers, simply getting traffic to their site is not good enough. In fact, if users don’t engage with their content, then that traffic is essentially useless. The definition of engagement has changed slightly over the years. Early measurements of engagement focused on Bounce Rate and Pages per Session. However, those […]