Everything You Can Do with Raven SEO Tools

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Ann Smarty

02/16/09

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I’ve wanted to review Raven SEO tools for a long time and at last doing that now. The service offers a most feature-rich analytics toolkit with really sleek and robust interface (no kidding). It has both free and paid accounts (PRO account costs $100 per month). You can go ahead and compare features (they are listed on the home page).

*UPDATE*

As of 11/04/2009 Search Engine Journal has partnered with Raven SEO Tools to bring SEJ Tools, a new cobranded service from SEJ which is powered by Raven SEO Tools and adds new and more features. We’re offering a Free 30 Day Trial : SEJ Tools powered by Raven

They also offer a cool-looking FireFox toolbar for easier access to all their data and reports.

Inside you will find 5 main sections: Research, Links, Content Manager, Analytics, Reports and Admin – each of them described below.

Research

Quality Analyzer:

You can submit a domain here and get a large report on its current progress with explanation on each section. Your domain will also be scored based on its overall performance:

• Indexed pages in Google and Yahoo;
• Links to website in Google and Yahoo;
• .EDU and .GOV links (in Yahoo!);
• Domain age and expiration (this scores as “Google prefers domains registered for longer than one year.”);
• Google PageRank;
• Alexa Traffic;
• Dmoz presence.

The report is then rounded up with the conclusion on how well the site is doing and if it is worth pursuing a link from.

The whole report is also available in .pdf format.

Wordtracker: keyword research done by Wordtracker with the ability to add each term to the SERP tracker.

SEMRush: research any domain organic rankings or organic competitors (via SEMRush, reviewed at SEJ).

AdWords Research: keyword research powered by Google External tool.

Design Analyzer looks into your webpage and scores it based on:

• HTML semantic structure;
• Download time / page size;
• Outgoing links.

In the end the tool lists some recommendations as to improving your design score. This report is also available in .pdf format.

Keyword Analyzer: reports on the page keywords. It lists page most frequent terms and invites to add any of them to the SERPs tracker.

Links

Link manager: This section allows to monitor your link building campaign. You can add a site / page where you requested a link from, add status to it (“Active”, “Requested”, etc)

Persona manager: Here you will be able to store your social media profiles.

Keyword manager: stores all your campaign keywords.

Content manager

Enables you to create content without the need to leave the Raven admin panel. You should give the tool access to your blog wp-admin and after that you will be able to create, edit, publish content using Raven tools.

SERP tracker:

Keywords: Add words manually or upload the list from your computer.

Track 1000 words; each keyword/search engine pair over the 1000 that are included with your account will be billed at the rate of $0.06/month.

Competitors:

Search Engines: set the search engines to track. Includes Google (and its local versions), Yahoo (also a few regional versions), Live / MSN

Here is how the report looks like (of course, you’ll be also able to download it as CSV or PDF file):

Analytics

In this section you will be given a piece of code to place on each of your webpages to start tracking traffic and referrals. Reports look like simplified Google analytics. You are given a variety of options to set the date range, see top referral domains, links and keywords.

Admin:

In this sections you can add users. Two roles are available: admin (who can manage users, roles, and profiles) and regular user who can only access reports. You can have only one user with a free account and two users with a PRO account.

This review is totally independent and reflects solely my opinion. See SEJ review disclosure for more information.