We wanted to thank everyone who has been following our blog. The blog will be a bit sparse this week, because we're putting the final touches on our Raven SEO Tools — implementing help and tutorials, squashing bugs and doing overall cleanup. Raven will officially launch next Monday and will be officially "out of beta!"
We'll continue to publish the SEO Daily Reading and might be able to even squeeze out an in depth review of Market Motive, but other than that we'll be hard at work polishing up Raven.
Stay tuned for more information about our official launch. We think you'll be pleasantly surprised when we release our introductory pricing and also officially announce our new Raven Firefox toolbar (it's rad!).
Beta Site Pushes AOL Finance to Top Spot
TechCrunch today reported that the new AOL finance site (which was the third largest finance site behind Yahoo! Finance and MSN Money), have now surpassed their competitors to achieve the top spot in terms of unique visitors.
Yahoo! Moves its Metasearch Engine FareChase to Travel Homepage
Yahoo's acquisition of FareChase in 2004 finally pays off. They signal their intent about competing in the travel price-comparison market by making FareChase the default search engine for pricing flights, hotels, cars, and vacations.
Bebo Opens Up in Bid For More Third Party Apps
Bebo have announced their Bebo Open Application Platform is 100% open. This means that any third party developer can deploy their applications on Bebo. Previously the platform has only been made available to a select group. Interestingly enough, Bebo still supports OpenSocial. How long this will last remains to be seen.
Raven Blog Entry Recap
Truveo Index Now Contains 100 Million Videos
Truveo yesterday announced that its index had exceeded 100 million online videos. Search marketers that are interested in pursuing this field in 2008 take note: Truveo anticipates the online video universe to reach one billion searchable videos by 2009.
Google Looks Back On 2007
The official Google blog took a look back at 2007 month by month. Did you know that it wasn't until April of last year that they added the URL removal function to Webmaster Tools? The 'Big G' also released some detailed stats, one of which was their top search queries for December.
Do Deep Folders Stop Search Engines?
Every so often folder depth rears it's head as an obstacle to search engines on the hunt for high ranking content. Marios Alexandrou at All Things SEM is running an experiment to see if deep folders stop (or obstruct) search engines.
Raven SEO Recap
News from the SEO world this week includes Google adding blogs to Universal Search, using YouTube as a search method, and questions to ask when doing a social media campaign.
Google Adds Blogs to Universal Search
An intriguing news item from PC Magazine this week revealed that blogs are going to be the latest genre for Google's Universal Search. Yahoo!, Live and Ask.com already have similar blog search capabilities and no wonder, the blogosphere is now a vibrant, developing community with up-to-the-minute content. Which search engine wouldn't want that?
YouTube an Alternative Search Method?
I predicted a few weeks ago in my Twelve Link Building Tactics for 2008 blog post that Visual Media would rise to the top in 2008. It seems Google has cottoned onto my prediction of the search power of visual media. A TechCrunch article explains more.
10 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Campaign
Social Media holds a mighty influence on the Web and is very prudent and effective way of marketing. The Marketing Pilgrim website has a list (composed by Andy Beard) of 10 questions you must address before participating in a social media campaign.
Raven SEO Recap
With PubCon and SES Chicago going on at the same time, there is plenty to review in the world of SEO this week.
Sub Domains to be Treated as Folders by Google
Fresh out of PubCon this week is the intriguing development that sub domains are to be treated as folders by Google. The impact of this perhaps wont be felt immediately, but when it happens the implications could be drastic. Keep an eye out for more developments of this story.
The World's First .com Domain Name
If you had to take a guess at the world's first .com domain name, what would you pick? Think.com, sun.com or adobe.com? If you chose either one of those as your pick, you'd be incorrect. It was in fact symbolic.com which is still active today after all these years! Some of the domains will be familiar to a lot of you, but there are some surprises on the top one-hundred list.
Using ALT Attributes Correctly
At the Google Webmaster Central blog, Matt Cutts the head of Google's Web Spam Team offers up some useful tips on how to fully utilize and optimize your ALT attributes. Back in the day when search engines weren't so advanced, many webmasters would keyword stuff their ALT attributes in the hope of higher rankings. However, the search engines quickly caught on to the technique and sites caught doing this could have their rankings lowered or become delisted entirely.
Raven Blog Recap
With Scott and Jon drinking working hard in Las Vegas this week at PubCon, we have a bunch of blog entries to go over:
Features 
