Where’s that time machine? Bing is using the meta keywords tag in its ranking algorithm again.

Kinda.

Danny Sullivan’s The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing & Why Only Spammers Should Use It article offers awesome insight from Duane Forrester of MSN.

To summarize – the meta keyword tag won’t make a huge difference, but Bing may use it to identify spammers via tag stuffing.

If you’re like me, this doesn’t change a whole lot. Personally, I haven’t used the meta keywords tag in a long time; not worth the time and effort in my opinion.

However. If you’ve got some pages that have some stuffed-to-the-nines keyword tags (for whatever reason – automation, past tactics, etc), you’ll want to audit your site(s) carefully. It’s time to clean them up. They may actually be working against you now, as a signal to Bing that you endorse spammy techniques.

It’s just good practice to use meta keywords properly (if you use it at all) but this is just one more very good reason to ensure that your pages are utilizing this tag properly. No need to draw negative attention to your site.

Simply: audit your pages’ keyword tags and clean ‘em up. Get rid of them altogether or use proper and relevant keywords.

For all the years I lived in Winnipeg, and since then, I was always very cynical about the NHL returning to Winnipeg. Even after last week’s announcement that TNS&E had purchased the Thrashers.

But the challenge of selling 13,000 season tickets was CRUSHED – more than half were sold through presale and the rest sold within 17 minutes of the general sale opening.

CONGRATULATIONS Winnipeg – thank you for proving me wrong!!

Suck it Bettman.

Every group has one. In the SEO industry, there are far too many – the folks who call themselves SEOs but are neglecting the knowledge behind on major factor – Online Reputation Management.

Read the story of SEO Columbus by my SEO friend Mike Halvorsen.  If you don’t read it (though you really should), here’s the coles notes version.

Mike is an SEO. He recently moved to Columbus so on his PERSONAL blog, he created a navigational link with the anchor text “SEO Columbus”.  Apparently there’s another SEO in Columbus (Joe) who is insisting he “owns” the term and is insisting that Mike remove instances of that keyword that confuse him with Joe’s business.

Except Joe doesn’t own the trademark for SEO Columbus.  In fact, you can’t even trademark the term SEO Columbus, SEO Toronto, SEO Canada, etc.

After a bit of back and forth (mostly forth), Mike did the sensible thing – reach out to the SEO community.  The result is many, many comments by Mike’s supporters and a few attempts at rebuttle by Joe.

Here’s the thing.  Now Joe has made some enemies. Now there are comments and blog posts and even spoof sites against Joe and his company (which, by the way, is KaLor Technology, not SEO Columbus).

Joe’s got himself a biiiig online reputation management (ORM) mess.  It’s one thing when negative comments are posted organically through user review sites, but when those reviews are coming from professional and proven SEOs… well.  That’s pretty much disaster.  If Joe didn’t realize that branding with a generic phrase wasn’t wise before, he needs to realize it now and seriously consider rebranding himself to a) escape this mess and b) avoid it in the future.

I’m sure we’ll all be watching the SERPs for any movement in the top spot for “SEO Columbus“.  Despite Joe’s exact match domain and years of reputation building, I don’t think it will stand against a community of search professionals banding together for the right cause. Stay tuned.

Google made a significant shift with it’s organic search results in the past few weeks.  Now, by default, you are served results based on your geographic location.

Signed in or not, if your search query qualifies, you’ll see that on the right a map appears over the paid listings.  See my search below for office furniture:

This is pretty handy if you’re looking to shop somewhere in person and for brick and mortar businesses, this is a fantastic change.  But what if you’re an online retailer?  How can you possibly compete with this?  This is an issue and needs to be answered.  I’d love to hear how you think this problem can be solved.

With all the major search engines long abandoning the META keywords tag (except for Yahoo, but its search results are soon to be powered by Bing), there seems to be less and less of a reason to use the META keywords tag.

Do you still use it?  And by use it, I mean put effort into putting relevant keywords in the tag.

I upgraded my iPhone to OS4 the other day (without drama, thank goodness). Yesterday I noticed a new icon at the top.

I thought, cool! It’s a compass pointing north! Then I realized that, from sitting at my desk at work, it was actually pointing southeast. That was my DUH moment. I realized it’s just the indicated that GPS is on. Then the other DUH moment. My 3G doesn’t have compass abilities.

Oh OS4, you did fool me there. But it’s ok, I’m smart again!

Last month, Raven Tools launched a contest to win a year long subscription to their toolset. Second place won a six-month subscription and third through tenth won a RavenHunt t-shirt.

I came in third. I may have won the first t-shirt, but I felt like the first loser for missing out on the big prizes.

This time around the prizes are even BIGGER. First place wins:

• Apple iPad
• 1 year Pro subscription to Raven Tools
• Premium Membership to Search Engine Land
• Copy of  The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web by Tamar Weinberg
• Copy of Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik
• Official RavenHunt t-shirt

Here are some quick facts about the RavenHunt contest:

• RavenHunt is free for anyone and you can start playing at any time
• There are two RavenHunt clues released each day
• The object of RavenHunt is to collect the secret letters you find when you solve riddles
• On Friday, the second RavenHunt clue will include a form for you to input the unscrambled secret word (using the secret letters you found)
• You need to follow Raven’s Facebook and Twitter accounts to be updated on when clues are released

I’ve already mentioned what the first place winner is and here are the rest of the prizes.

Second Place:

• 6 month Pro subscription to Raven
• Official RavenHunt t-shirt

3rd-10th:

• Official RavenHunt t-shirt

Get out there and get playing! It’s super easy and lots of fun. RavenHunt takes you through some of the industry’s most popular blogs and posts and addresses hot issues. And, if you win a bonus prize, you get to squish Matt Cutts’ head all day long too.

It never occured to me until today how hard it is to contact Twitter support with a unique request. On the Twitter Support page, they’ve got lots of information but no help on how to contact them unless you’re reporting spam (in which case you simply tweet to @spam).

After about 10 minutes of digging, I found a link that will allow you to open a new ticket for contacting Twitter support.

Without further adieu, here is the link to open a new ticket with Twitter Support.

Funny, pointless and a waste of time – does it get better than this?

Begin! Make sure you leave your statement in the comments.

Pick the month you were born:
January … I kicked
February … I loved
March … I karate chopped
April … I licked
May … I jumped on
June … I smelled
July … I did the Macarena With
August … I had lunch with
September … I danced with
October … I sang to
November … I yelled at
December … I ran over

Pick the day (number) you were born on:
1 … a birdbath
2 … a monster
3 … a phone
4 … a fork
5 … a snowman
6 … a gangster
7 … my mobile phone
8 … my dog
9 … my best friends’ boyfriend
10 … my neighbour
11 … my science teacher
12 … a banana
13 … a fireman
14 … a stuffed animal
15 … a goat
16 … a pickle
17 … your mom
18 … a spoon
19 … a smurf
20 … a baseball bat
21 … a ninja
22 … Chuck Norris
23 … a noodle
24 … a squirrel
25 … a football player
26 … my sister
27 … my brother
28 … an iPod
29 … a surfer
30 … a homeless guy
31 … a llama

What is the last number of the year you were born:
1 … In my car
2 … On your car
3 … In a hole
4 … Under your bed
5 … Riding a Motorcycle
6 … sliding down a hill
7 … in an elevator
8 … at the dinner table
9 … In line at the bank
0 … in your bathroom

Pick the color of shirt you are wearing:
White … because I’m cool like that
Black … because that’s how I roll.
Pink … -because I’m NOT crazy.
Red … because the voices told me to.
Blue … because I’m sexy and I do what I want
Green … because I think I need some serious help.
Purple … because I’m AWESOME!
Gray … because Big Bird said to and he’s my leader.
Yellow … because someone offered me 1,000,000 dollars
Orange … because my family thinks I’m stupid anyway.
Brown … because I can.
Other … because I’m a Ninja!
None … because I can’t control myself!

We’re having some technical difficulties but @RavenJon promises we will have a demo.

Jon is showing off his desktop background, a Henshaw original painting.

And now he just yelled at me to pay attention. In the mic. Hmph.

Jon explains how the tool got started, dealing with the tedious tasks and made it into an automated process. Now the Raven tools are growing and growing with lots of new features all the time.

Whether you’re agency or in-house, it can help you manage your campaigns and keep track of your sites, help with keyword and competitive research, link building, contacts, content management, social media monitoring, search engine rankings, Google analytics integration and more.

In Raven, you can set up profiles and within those profiles you can manage one or many sites.

The dashboard has all the web sites for that profile with quick links and options for each.

RESEARCH

The research assistant tool allows you to research your own or competitors by domain or by keyword

• In Jon’s example, he uses “seo tools” as the keyword which returns related keywords, CPC, number of results, volume, etc. What’s awesome about this tool is how it allows you to add the keywords to your manager or SERP tracker with one click.
• Click Save View to see this later or run a report on it.
• Also in the research assistant is the Page Analyzer tool. Enter a URL and it will find relationships and ideas in regards to location, businesses, people and keywords.

DASHBOARD

Keyword Manager

• Includes Google AdWords data, links and SERP tracking for your keywords.

Competitor Manager

• Compare your site rankings with your competitors. You can also set up alerts if anything changes for you or your competitors.

Event Manager

• Add events like newsletters, publications, etc., and overlay that event onto your other reports (like traffic, SERP traffic).

Raven reports are downloaded to branded PDF documents. (awesomesauce!!)

LINKS

• Take the domain that you want a link from and run it in the quality analyzer report and the tool will give a grade out of 100.
• If you decide you want that link, click “add link” on the toolbar (when you’re on that site) and fill in the details. Tons of options, including assigning that link to someone else.
• Sorts your links by status (queued, requested, active, etc.)
• The Web Site Directory will get you tons more information about the site you flagged for a link.
• Contact them for a link
• Once it’s online, click “add link” again and update the status to Active.

Other options:

• Link status (check every month to see if anything has changed)
• PR change, Nofollow, Link removed, Etc.
• Email alerts

Jon went through the notification and alert options – totally customizable.

Jon mentioned that all reports can be exported; you don’t have to use their reports.

CONTENT

Content manager

• Useful for a copywriter to save content to and then have someone else approve it.

Blog manager

• Put in blog posts and schedule them for publishing

SOCIAL

Persona Manager

• Great for more than one social persona (other employees, corporate personas, etc.)
• You can log into your social network sites from the toolbar
• Twitter module is available for extra data about that account. You can also tweet from this manager. Custom URL shorteners will be available in Q1.

Social Media Monitor

• Partnered with social mention
• Set up as many searches as you want (your own or competitors), pick sources and choose whether or not to be alerted daily
• Report show buzz, sentiment graph, daily mentions etc.
• For each result, choose a sentiment and the sentiment graph will update

KnowEm

• Integration with this tool, further integration hopefully coming

Omgili

• Search forums using keywords

SERPS

SERP Tracker

• Compare competitor SERP ranking side by side
• Change display settings (turn on/off competitors, search engines, Google AdWord data, baseline data)
• Trending available for up to six months of data. Cached results available!

Jon stealthily showed what search engines are available for this tool.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics data is imported into the Raven reporting tool. Overlay trendlines and events over the GA data.

Report Wizard

• Report settings include report name, brand template, report template, scheduling options and date range. Choose to email the reports directly to the client.
• Drag and drop report pieces and drag them around to choose order.
• Reporting options galore. Far too many to be able to mention here.
• All report sections have an option to add summaries.
• Jon says you can templatize these reports. Is that a word? If not, it should be.

Admin

• Add users and roles and the user will only see the modules they have access to.
• Rolls apply per web site.
• JavaScript snippit available to allow for user login access.

Other Stuff

Messaging, tasks, contacts and more!

Aaaaand we’re done. Kickin’ ass and taking names. Or business cards.