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 […]
Once upon a time, everyone stood around the water cooler and talked about the same shows. After all, they’d all watched the same shows the night before. But not anymore. Now, there is a limitless number of ways you can consume thousands of television shows, movies, and videos. You can watch them when you want, […]
For years I have been receiving numerous outreach messages I simply couldn’t reply to or act upon for a manifold reasons. There seems to be a real disconnect between the outreach messages marketers or PR people send and the reality of actual bloggers who are meant to write about products. I’m going to point out […]
Just yesterday morning, hackers compromised the computer systems of a major contractor responsible for providing background checks for the U.S. government. (Source: CNN) And, in light of this week’s other enormous security breach by a Russian gang, first reported in The New York Times, we thought it was important for you to be able to explain […]
If you handle social media marketing for multiple clients, not posting to the wrong account is a foundational skill, right up there with spelling. So, when you get it wrong, you could be in for a long day. Unfortunately it’s easier than ever to forget you’re in the wrong account since social networking services are now gateways to other services. […]
Inbound Marketing Is Dead Yep, that’s right. Inbound marketing is dead. And no, this isn’t some gimmick headline. Inbound marketing really has gone the way of the dodo. Sad day. But before discussing the cause of death, let’s take a moment of silence to pay our respects and reflect on the life that was taken […]
Not every company can boast customers who want to shout their praises. Raven’s been fortunate. It seems as though every month we get emails from customers asking how they can be featured on our website or in our newsletter. Click Consult, a U.K.-based digital agency, is one such customer. They’ve been using Raven for nine […]
The SEO industry clearly has more than 9 lives. For every linkbait piece proclaiming the death of SEO, there’s a retort published on a marketing blog. Society can’t quite decide if SEO still has a pulse or not. As long as search exists, I don’t see SEO going away. SEO isn’t something that dies; it […]
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 […]
Beautiful people make beautiful babies. In the same way, a data mashup can be a beautiful thing when great data comes together from two sources. In Raven software, you’ll find data mashups around every corner, so we’re familiar with what makes a great one. First, a data mashup is great when there are high quality data sources […]
Raven’s link building tool has been a staple for SEOs and online marketers for years. I want to make the distinction between on-page SEO and off-page SEO because I think there’s a lot of confusion about what constitutes search engine optimization and would like to broaden the use of the term. Then you can dig into Raven’s list […]
One of the greatest things about WordPress is the ability to find a plugin for just about anything. In fact, their developer community is second to none when it comes to CMS add-ons. Since plugins are a big draw to the WordPress platform, it’s common for many site admins to add a lot of plugins […]
There’s a current Web design trend that’s disadvantageous to your overall success on the Web. It’s called one-page websites – sites that only have one page and instead of linking to internal pages, just scroll when you click on the navigation. Single-page websites are neither findable nor sharable, and the user experience of unexpected scrolling is […]
People who surf the Web all day love shortcuts and efficiencies. When you’re writing an online article, it seems obvious to link out to websites that your readers might want to check out. You’re just making it convenient for them, right? That might be what you think, especially if you’re new to online marketing. Many […]
Who reading this remembers CompuServe, AOL and the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs)? These 70s-, 80s- and 90s-era online meeting places allowed users to communicate through a central messaging system and post messages to other users. In many ways, American Online was the Internet before the Internet, with its member-created communities. Businesses new to social media management may think social […]
It’s live! No more waiting for Raven to update our Google Analytics reports with the data you want most. Based on customer feedback, we reorganized and added more than a dozen new metrics and views to make your reports really sing. Two key new menus make it much easier to find the data you need: Table Content chooser (a.k.a […]
Recently I revisited the concept of flagship content which I have successfully implemented numerous times in the past. Back then, though, it was a bit fuzzy. I created it more intuitively without analyzing how I did it exactly. Last week I had to explain it again to a consulting client, so I came up with an easy to […]
There’s a lot of new top level domains (TLDs) coming our way – almost 2,000 in all. The hope is that people and companies that couldn’t get the domain name they wanted with a .com or other common TLD will not only be able to get the one they want, but will also get one […]
When was the last time you double checked to make sure your data is secure? What about the data you handle for your clients? We recently told folks using Raven software they should change their passwords after we responded to the Heartbleed bug, which affected half the Internet. Very few people use only half the Internet, so […]
Panda 4.0 rolled out over the past several days, and it seems to be a pretty significant update. While some Panda updates have been a ‘data refresh,’ there are a lot of bigger ripples this time around (~7.5% of English queries.) Panda is designed to keep websites with low quality content from ranking near the […]
