This month many companies that you may already be using, or a have heard about previously, updated their services or released new product offerings. Here is a brief outline of the pick of the bunch.
This month many companies that you may already be using, or a have heard about previously, updated their services or released new product offerings. As Search Engine Watch (SEW) provided last month, here is a brief roundup of the pick of the bunch:
Optify, typically an enterprise level search and social lead management platform, announced an affordable plan for small businesses at $99/mo. The “basic edition” plan still contains many of the desired features, such as: keyword discovery, lead tracking, Twitter tracking, lead scoring, back link tracking and keyword tracking. Optify can create custom plans for users looking for an inbetween package. Some of the high-end features include Salesforce CRM integration, API usage, and consulting.
Optify also released a new training tool to help users get the best out of the platform.
As we see industry studies suggesting more emphasis is placed on social signals for organic search rankings, SEW welcomes the newest version of Open Site Explorer (OSE) from SEOmoz. OSE 3.0 not only brings valuable back link profiles, but now also shows social metrics at the domain level. A new user interface boasts cleanliness and simplicity versus the prior version. Not only that, expect to see better filters for sorting, improved side-by-side competitor glances and more pages in the Linkscape index.
My favorite new feature: by querying a domain in OSE, a user can click on “top pages” and quickly determine which pages have received the most social activity.
A company to “keep on the radar” is BrightLocal. The reason is simple, it’s a credit-based system where a user can enter in their campaign details and retrieve both local and organic rankings for a site. Agencies can now maintain profiles which will run branded ranking reports (on local and organic) and even provide local citation recommendations depending on where you are not already listed. Not only that, the tools can be served through your domain. Look for the Brightlocal API release soon.
Recently, the big three search engines announced they would work together and create standardized tags using micro data. Their efforts produced schema.org. As micro data increases in popularity, why not expedite the process of creating it?
That is precisely what Raven Tools has done. This fun little tool is worth exploring and makes it much easier for people like to me to wrap their head around the possibilities of micro data itself. For those of you unfamiliar with micro data, it was introduced with HTML5 and is a way of adding more context for search engines and applications to your HTML. Schema-Creator is very helpful for creating tags for movies, organizations, book titles, events, reviews, and people.
Raven also announced a bunch of new enhancements to their link manager tool, which include improved data filtering and custom link types.
SortPrice upgraded their Store Application for Facebook with a new feature that enables merchants to offer ‘Flash Sales’ targeted to their Facebook fans. The feature is quick to setup and provides merchants with a Groupon-style offer that includes a countdown clock which ticks down until the offer closes. Benefits of the feature are:
