Do what you do best.  It is classic advice, and in business parlance it is often referred to as sticking to the core competency of a business.  What is one to do if their core competency does not include advertising/copywriting skills?  The answer is that they need to outsource, at least temporarily.  Some copywriting skills can be learned, but some skills are particularly difficult to master.  For example, writing three line advertisements/calls to action that are even shorter than the notoriously minuscule offerings found in newspapers for generations.  For this, BoostCTR might be the place to turn to for outsourcing because this is BoostCTR’s core competency.

The One Potential Flaw

Well, it would be more accurate to say that writing three lines of effective copy is not necessarily BoostCTR’s core competency, but the core competency of their writers.  Those writers are freelancers, and that means that they are transitory by nature; if the economy is down, then it is very likely that BoostCTR will have an ample stable of very capable writers.  If the economy is up, then there might be fewer and/or less talented writers that will be less willing to compete for bargain basement assignments.  It is certainly not fair to hold a single company responsible for the economy, but it is worth pointing out that there may be very strong links between the two in this case.  Perhaps the net effect is very little, but it would be nice to have professional writers on salary to offset this potential risk.

How Does BoostCTR Work?

The big question most people have when first hearing about BoostCTR is simple: how does the service work?  The answer is a little more complex than the question itself, but it is still relatively easy to follow: BoostCTR requires access to one’s AdWords login credentials in order to access existing ad groups which will be used to generate contests.  These contests are not dissimilar to a sort of copywriting fight club (we don’t talk about copywriting fight club) in which the initial text(s) taken from AdWords will be given the position as the reigning champion.  As better texts are created and tested in a real world environment, the champion will (almost always) be dethroned by a contender.  How long can that contender hang on to the crown?  That all depends on the quality and that is one of the best aspects of BoostCTR: the ability to reject texts and try them in the wild ensures effective copy, meaning that there is almost no risk factor.

Keeping Writers On-Board

Cash prizes can also be added to further entice writers to provide excellent copy.  As previously mentioned, this might be necessary in certain situations that may be predicated primarily upon the economy.

Impressive Value

The only risk associated with BoostCTR is that of the payment system, and it truly is not that risky.  In fact, it would be safe to say that it is really only an opportunity cost, and one that is well spent.  Here is how it works: every advertisement group sent in for an upgrade is subject to a toll of 1 credit.  These credits can be purchased in lots of one, three, five, and ten.  The price per advertisement group revision depends on how many credits are purchased at any one time, with more purchased at one time being a better idea for those with a frugal mindset.  The price per ad group for a single credit purchase is $75, while the cost per ad group on a 10 credit purchase is only $50.  Given that the advertisements are already field-proven, even a fee of over $100 would seem quite reasonable.

Agencies Get Something Too

Agencies looking to outsource their highly-specialized three-line copy are in luck too!  BoostCTR has exactly what they need, and that can be good for a number of reasons.  Agencies can certainly increase their bottom line substantially by only receiving quality work for a fair price.  The same is certainly true for webmasters and business operators as well; sticking to what one does best is a great way to make money, but that only works if it is possible to find others who will do what they do best at a reasonable price.  BoostCTR offers top-notch talent at prices that seem very reasonable.

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Raven SEO tools claims to have a suite of powerful tools designed to help effectively manage, market, research, report, and even create content for blogs.  Raven SEO is far from alone in this field (or these fields depending on how one chooses to view such tools), which might cause those looking for a new or different approach to wonder if the dark bird has what it takes.  As with any set of tools, that all really depends on what one is looking for.  The good news is that Raven’s bevy of tools and options allows them to compete in several different areas, but that is both a blessing and a curse in some cases.

One Size Fits All?

If there was one thing that was potentially troubling us before we got our hands on Raven, it was that tools that try to do too much often prove to be deficient in several key areas.  Luckily, we Raven SEO is backed by a team of very talented developers, engineers, artists, SEO specialists, and other employees.  The result is that Raven SEO feels more like someone took a number of top-notch standalone tools, taught them to play nicely together, and managed to create a unified and professional looking user interface to tie them all together.  In short, this black bird is anything but a black sheep.

Keywords, Competitors, and Events…Oh My!

Keyword research is one of the cornerstones of developing content, and part of keyword research is knowing that other players in the industry are doing.  There are some keyword research tools that only handle keyword research without handling even the basics of competitor and/or event tracking.  These tools, while potentially excellent at what they do, lack key features that Raven SEO brings to the table.

A real world example of how the highly integrated tools offered by Raven SEO would probably be best illustrated by considering what an affiliate marketer trying to extol the virtues of a generic widget might face in the course of a campaign.  All good campaigns will have a research phase, but knowing which keywords work today does not necessarily mean that those same keywords and phrases will work well tomorrow.  Furthermore, it might be instructive to see which keywords are being used by the competition.  After all, a change in market conditions or a single news story could influence search patterns as can a great number of competitors joining the field but offering poor content.

The last few examples are all events, but there are other events that can be tracked as well. Virtually any event can be easily entered into the timeline tracking system, and that allows for easy tracking of exposure and/or rankings.  While the tools do not allow for the automated establishment of events based on tracking of news or industry events based on RSS feeds or other sources, the ability to manually enter such information is still possible.

Manage This, That, and the Other Thing

What is all of that research, tracking, and information worth without a way to act on it?  This is where Raven SEO really shines and in our opinion, becomes far more than an SEO tool.  In fact, we would go so far as to say that Raven SEO is more of a Raven SEO plus due to the fact that it integrates other features that just about anyone who has been undertaking keyword research and/or market analysis will want to do.

Searching and Socialization, and Reports for Everything

One of the nicest tools included with the suite is the ability to move right from research to making connections.  The integrated search tool allows for one to easily look at the competition for other purposes as well, especially those relating to socialization.  After all, sometimes the best way to promote a site is engage in a little friendly link sharing, guest-posting, or otherwise plugging into the social pipeline.  In integrated contact manager and link manager helps content managers keep on top of what everyone is doing and manage their responsibilities.  A blog-, persona-, and content-manager are also integrated into the package, each one is worthy of a review of their own.

It is also worth noting that a great number of reports and reporting options are available, including white labeling.  Analytics, campaign report, agency and in-house marketing, and more are all readily available, attractive, and easily modified.  The white labeled reports are very suave and professional, unlike some competitors we could mention.

Pricing

Raven SEO comes in three primary forms, but it is possible to modify some aspects of each plan for an additional fee.  The BASIC plan offers a single user the ability to manage up to three websites (additional site cost $5 each) for $19.  The PRO plan costs $99 for two users, but adds unlimited website support, white labeling and a sub-domain at raventools.com, as well as increases the number of reports and links that can be stored in the link manager.  There is an AGENCY plan costs $249 for up to eight users, but radically increases the number of keywords, links, and reports that can be conducted.  Finding the right plan is made simple with the custom plan finder offered by Raven SEO, and there is even a free trial to test.

The Verdict

A free trial, a list of tools so long that one could write a whole series of books on them, and a user interface that makes using those tools effectively a cinch, it is hard not to recommend Raven SEO. For reviews of it’s competitors check out our SEOMoz Review and Scribe SEO Review.

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Scribe is a powerful SEO WordPress plug-in that promises to help content writers look at their writings from the perspective of a search engine.  Does Scribe SEO work, and if so is it a cost-effective solution?  It very well could be, but there is one thing that has to be said before we get into the heart of what Scribe SEO offers.

Articles and Posts are Read by Humans First

The problem with search engines is that they are, well, search engines.  They are statistical number crunchers that are incredibly complex but are still just a bunch of number crunchers that analyze words, links, syllables, and so on.  The human mind is far more complex and discerning, which is why search engines are starting to pay a lot more attention to data mined from social networking; this is what people are really looking at.  Why?  Because anyone who has ever dealt with SEO for any length of time knows that it used to be fairly easy to get to the top of the charts with ridiculous keyword density and meaningless content.

Today, content is king, and that fact should never be disregarded.  That means that products like Scribe can offer meaningful insight into how a search engine might see an article or post, but that does not mean that the post needs to be made completely unreadable in order to make the search engines happy.  Of course, there are happy mediums where readable content can be very search-engine accessible, but it does take a reasoning mind to make these decisions.

What Scribe Does

Scribe is a WordPress plug-in that lets writers analyze their content once they have a body, title, and description ready.  The process is not automatic, but requires the author to click on the ‘analyze’ button that appears only when all of these criteria are met.  After that, the WordPress screen will fade and a new window will appear in typical WordPress fashion.  The new Window will offer a score and a list of pass/fail assessments along with praise or suggestions depending upon how the content looks from the perspective of a search engine.

Some surprising revelations often happen to those who start using Scribe, especially to those who are not incredibly well versed in the intricate and ever-changing ways of search engines.  Do you know where keywords should be in the title, how long a description should be, how many links an article ought to have, what those links should look like, or even what your keywords are from the standpoint of a search engine?  Chances are that you probably do not if you are reading this review, because anyone who does know these things and knows that they know them is someone who lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps SEO.

How Much Time Can One Spend Learning SEO?

The truth about SEO is that the game is constantly changing, and that is the primary reason why Scribe is a service and not a software package.   As SEO changes, so does scribe, and that lets you keep up to date in a painless way.  Alternatively, one could virtually exist on message boards and chat endlessly with people who seem to live on espresso shots and cannot stop testing new things to uncover the latest SEO techniques and technologies.  Scribe employs people like this so that you do not have to decipher their strange language and caffeine jitters, you simply benefit from their knowledge and endless tinkering once you start using scribe.

Does Scribe Work?

Can Scribe take a site with terrible content and turn it into a rising star?  Probably not, as the content is still the important factor.  Can a site with great content be hobbled by witty innuendo or clever phrasing that stumps search engines?  Most definitely.  Is it possible for even a humorless site that gets straight to the point to be in need of a SEO-point of view?  Almost certainly.  This is where Scribe earns it pay, and now would also be a great time to bring up the fact that Scribe is a service with a monthly fee associated with it.

Pricing for Scribe is based upon the number of monthly evaluations one will need.  The Starter plan offers 30 evaluations per month for $27, while the Publisher package offers 120 evaluations for $47 per month and the Advanced package offers 300 evaluations for $97 per month.  Evaluations do not roll over, and the number of times a single piece may need to be evaluated to get it just right will vary from one content poster to the next.  Some people learn from their mistakes quickly and will soon only be using one to two evaluations per article, while others might take several tries to get it right for an extended period of time.

The bottom line is that Scribe SEO is a service that everyone but those caffeine junkies who spend their lives testing SEO technique for grins and giggles should at least try.  The results are often quite revealing and can help one understand just why their site has not been ranking as high as they had hoped.

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KnowEm Logo

KnowEm is a service that offers the tantalizing promise of being able to take control of your (or your company’s) social networking image through signing up on hundreds of social networking sites.  Does KnowEm work well?  It actually does, but there are a few things that it could do a little bit better that would make it an absolute must-have service.  That does not mean that KnowEm isn’t a must-have service right now, but before we get too far there is one thing that KnowEm should really be able to do but does not.

Name Suggestions

The entire premise of KnowEm is that the company will handle social networking signups and possibly even profile creation depending on the plan one chooses.  This is a great idea, but there is a small flaw in the execution that will hopefully be addressed soon: the lack of suggestions.  Any time one registers a domain, looks for an e-mail address, or even signs up for a social networking service, there is a good chance that the name they want is already taken.  Most top-notch services offer suggestions at this point, and this is where KnowEm falls a little flat.

KnowEm lets users search over 300 social networks for username availability, but it does not offer suggestions on new usernames.  Given the relatively low probability of one username being available on over 300 social networking sites, this would seem to be a very good idea.  Instead, KnowEm allows users with business-class accounts to select more than one username.  This might seem like a minor gripe, but it would be a very nice addition.

Other Than That

Over 300 networks

Other than that rather minor quip, what KnowEm does it manages to do very well: sign up for social networks.  If one were to measure the amount of time that it would take them to establish a presence on a few hundred social networks, write down the passwords, upload pictures, and fill out profile information, they would probably be looking at dozens or even a hundred hours worth of work.  Weighing this against the cost of public relations damage that could be caused by some agitated customer or jilted rival copying one’s popular social networking username and running amok on dozens of networks can be incalculable.

KnowEm offers a solution to both of these problems, as they will handle all of the sign-up information and even upload pictures/handle profile details for those with Agency-Class plans.  Personal plans can be free, which is really more of a sampler, or $99 for one with enough features to be truly useful.  For $99 KnowEm will handle the initiation process for 150 of the top social networking sites, but that still leaves hundreds of sites for hooligans to run amok on.  Step up to the Business plan for $249 nets one fewer sites (100 vs. 150), but also includes profile updates.  The Corporate plan for $349 is identical to the Business plan but covers 150 sites, while the Enterprise plan covers 300 of the most popular sites for $599.  The Business, Corporate, and Enterprise plans are all considered to be Agency-class plans, and that comes with one other perk: the possibility of brand protection.

How Clear is Your Crystal Ball?

Who knew Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter would take off like they did?  The answer is: almost nobody until it happened.  Can your business and/or web presence afford to let some new social network become popular without your profile being reserved?  If the answer is no, then KnowEm has a solution: a $49 monthly Brand Protection Program that will automatically sign your organization up for another 20 to 30 social networking sites.  This includes the full profile creation, and this service is only available to those who avail themselves of an Agency-Class plan.

Bottom Line

With a free KnowEm account that lets new users see the value of KnowEm, and there is a lot of value in keeping one’s message concise and from a single source, it is only a matter of time until they upgrade.  The free Basic account has nothing wrong with it, but it involves a lot of manual work.  For those on a shoestring budget, the manual data entry is not so bad.  For those that value their time more than a few dollars, the Personal and Agency-Class plans are simply beyond compare.

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SEO Moz offers a familiar promise to potential users: a suite of tools that will check a website for errors and possible search engine optimizations, as well as another set of keyword/phrase tools.  Many packages offer either error checking/content analysis or the keyword research tools, but few offer effective tools that handle both types of tasks.  Does SEO Moz deliver, or does it simply serve up too many promises to actually have any hope of meeting them?

Before Getting Started

Before we answer this question and delve into the features that SEO Moz does have to offer, it is worth noting that SEO Moz has a LOT to offer.  In fact, it can be a little intimidating to use at first because it actually includes a lot of tools.  This is a mixed blessing because there are a lot of tools to learn.  On the other side, SEO Moz’s individual tools are cleanly laid out and are fairly intuitive.  This makes SEO Moz easy to start using, but it would not be an understatement to say that it could take one a long time to become an SEO Moz guru.

The Tools of the SEO Trade

Without a doubt, SEO Moz has some very effective tools.  It does not really matter what one needs an SEO package to do, SEO Moz almost certainly has a tool to handle that need.    SEO Moz includes tools that not only handle the traditional keyword analysis/competitor tracking, but also a unique tool called the Keyword Difficulty Tool.  The Keyword Difficulty Tool is a unique idea that takes a lot of data and distills it into the answer of a single question: is this keyword/phrase worth trying to rank for?  This is an impressive tool in and of itself, but there are times when the data available on the Internet is misleading; in fact, many have made a lot of money with nothing but a little foresight required to arrive first on any particular keyword scene.

While the Keyword Difficulty Tool is certainly a unique and useful tool (most of the time), SEO Moz still has more to offer.  Once a site is up, it needs to have a sitemap and pages filled with meta-tags.  Anyone who has spent any amount of time studying SEO knows the value of meta-tags, and SEO Moz also knows the value and offers some tools that are not dissimilar from the competition.  Tools that evaluate meta-data and/or content are fairly common, so we will not cover them in detail other than to say that SEO Moz can automatically point out everything from glaring errors and omissions to providing useful hints and tips on a per page, whole site, or selected page basis.

SEO Moz also includes a full suite of tracking and reporting tools, most of which are incredibly flexible.  One of our first thoughts upon looking at the reporting aspect of SEO Moz was that it was obvious that people who like reports work at SEO Moz.  It would be impossible to create such concise yet elegant reports unless one were to have a fetish for reports and data.  While we are not sure just who it is over at SEO Moz that has a ‘thing’ for reports, we do appreciate their amazing attention to detail.

How Much Would You Buy Time For?

One of the most interesting aspects of SEO Moz is how much time it saves.  Want to see all of the page ranking information on a single page?  SEO Moz can do it, and that can save one time checking several different tools that individually manage Yahoo!, Google, Bing, and other search engines.  Examples such of this are found throughout SEO Moz’s user interface, and the entire package honestly feels as if it was written by people with a design doctrine that was equal parts engineering for efficiency and no-time-to-waste-Corporate-America.  That is not a bad thing, it means that the no-nonsense interface generate answers to questions in significantly less time than almost any other tool that we could name off the top of our heads.

This brings up a good question: how much is your time worth?  If you need to look at only one or two tools at a time, then SEO Moz might not have much value.  If you need to look at many different data sources in one legible format, then it is difficult to argue against the value of a package that puts everything in one place.

So, how much does SEO Moz cost?  There are three plans to choose from: PRO Basic, PRO Plus, and PRO Elite.  All plans include all of the tools, but are primarily differentiated by the number of Linkscape reports and tracked ranking.  For example, the PRO Basic plan offers 50 tracked rankings per month and 20 Linkscape reports for $79 versus the 100 tracked rankings and 50 Linkscape reports of the PRO Plus package that costs $129 per month.  The PRO Elite package costs $229 per month, but offers up a stunning 300 tracked rankings and 500 Liinkscape reports.  While some of these fees might seem a bit high, there is no substitute for SEO Moz’s ability to buy time with its incredible array of well-laid out tools.

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Lately we’ve been doing a lot more PPC (pay per click) – Adwords, Yahoo, MSN – and the more PPC I get into, the more I appreciate SEO.

If you have a real brand or something worth advertising, you should probably do both. But from my perspective, I’ll take SEO over PPC anyday. Why?

In many categories a good CTR for paid ads is 5% (this is assuming you have a good quality score and are bidding for good placement). That means that if you’re spending enough money, you will only get 5 visitors per 100 to go to your site. Compare that with about 50%, which is about what you should expect from being in the top organic spot.

10 times the traffic? That sounds a lot better. And you’re not paying for it! That means you’re immune to bidding wars, click fraud, etc. Plus if you have the content and the authority, you’re pulling in long tail traffic that you could never really even bid on in PPC.

Yes, SEO is a lot more work up front. But PPC has gotten a lot more complicated over the past few years – in some ways there’s just as much to know about it as there is in SEO. Most good marketers agree that you should do both, but if I had to choose I’d pick SEO.

P.S. Oh, one another HUGE advantage of SEO over PPC: branded terms. Lots of affiliate programs won’t allow you to bid on branded terms and trademarks in PPC, and those are often the highest converting keywords out there.

P.P.S. If you don’t believe me, ask the SEO dream team.

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Good news: If you’re going to Pubcon this December and haven’t booked your stay yet, you can still get a killer rate for the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas.

I have a promotional code for $159 per night that you can use – I just called and they still have availability for Tuesday and Wednesday (the lowest price for Thursday night is $599).

Regularly the rooms are about $500 and up (if they have availability) so this is a really good deal. So if you want to party like a rockstar without breaking the bank this December, shoot me and email and I’ll give you the promo code (which also gives you a $25 free slot play credit).

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Facebook just announced that it will be opening up people’s photos and names to indexing (no doubt to squeeze more traffic and ad revenue) to Google, which will result in millions of extremely “thin content” pages getting indexed.

With no other useful information, I would say that most all of these will probably end up in the supplemental index. Actually, now that the supplemental label is gone, it will end up in the “little importance” index, which is probably still enough for it to get tons of no-competition long tail traffic (to monetize).

Flickr is a good case study for this – most of its millions of pages have a photo and little else and almost all of the site is supplemental.

Maybe Matt Cutts needs to talk to Facebook and let them know that Google hates thin content. But maybe it doesn’t matter when you have a PR8.

Personally I’m a little pissed off that Facebook keeps introducing these things by default and then tells me that I need to take action if I don’t want to partake in the gradual erosion of my privacy. Not enough to stop using it, but still.

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Ever since I’ve started reading more about the domain and domaining business, I’ve started to feel a sort of kinship with domainers. They are a lot like SEO’s – misunderstood and often vilified by the outside world – or more precisely the people who don’t understand the world of domaining or the world of SEO.

Many people erroneously associate SEO with spamming. Likewise, they associate domaining with cybersquatting. Mainstream articles do neither justice because more often than not they are fraught with misinformation. Even when reporters try to quote experts, they end up making the wrong connections and perpetuating the problem.

The people behind spam comments (that we all hate) and “buy viagra” serps and BS squidoo pages are search spammers, not SEOs, although some people consider them a subset of SEOs. Similarly, people who register misspellings of brand domains are typosquatters, not legitimate domainers. The majority of each group tend to denounce the black sheep and create distinctions, but the broad associations still exist.

What really complicates this are the gray areas that exist. In SEO, it’s all the grayhat practices that are just shy of shady; in domaining it’s stuff like domain tasting and domain kiting.

So who is more hated? The guy who ranks above you with a “worse site” or the guy who’s running adSense on a domain you “just thought of”?

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I just upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.2.1 – partly because a friend warned me of a fairly dangerous exploit in the previous version. Since I’m hosted with Dreamhost, I use the “upgrade” option they offer in their admin panel, which is a quick and easy way to upgrade to the latest version of WP.

A few weeks ago I moved two of my posts to another blog using the .htaccess file method, but after upgrading to the new version of WordPress, the .htaccess file was apparently overwritten and the 301 redirects no longer worked. It’s a good thing I checked since the posts here were coming up here again, potentially causing duplicate content issues.

Since that’s the 2nd time I’ve had this happen, and since there were only 2 posts that needed to be moved, I decided to create a more fail-safe solution to this problem.

My permanent URL’s had been in this form:

blog.auinteractive.com/quick-introduction-to-hdr-photography/

so I created a directory with that same name and placed an index.php file within it using the following code:

So now if you go to

blog.auinteractive.com/quick-introduction-to-hdr-photography/

it will go to the directory and call

/quick-introduction-to-hdr-photography/index.php

and redirect that post to its rightful new home.

This way, when I upgrade my WordPress or make any changes to my .htaccess file, those directories will stay intact and make sure the posts are properly redirected. As an added precaution, I’d suggest deleting the old posts from the old domain once you see that Googlebot crawled it to prevent duplicate content issues in the future.

I guess another way to avoid this problem would be to backup your .htaccess file before upgrading your WordPress installation – especially if you have many rewrite rules.

P.S. Thanks to DaveN for the tip about using the WordPress code display plugin.

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