Lyndsay Walker : lyndseo : Search Engine Optimization

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

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.

One thing I missed in my last post is that Google Sitemaps has been renamed to Google Webmaster Central. Definitely more appropriate, but far too many syllables.

The Preferred Domain tool, which apparently was called such because Danny Sullivan can’t pronounce “canonical” is in fact to cure canonical issues. I know a lot of people will be happy about that.

I’ll head to the convention center shortly to register for SES, but I see that while I was sleeping like a baby, Matt Cutts posted a “12 Tips for SES” video.

While watching, he mentions that Google Sitemaps rolled out some new features on Friday. Sure enough! The first thing I noticed is a “Preferred Domain” tool.

This tool allows you to choose whether you want all indexed domain.com pages to appear as www.domain.com, or vice versa.

Will this really help with the ever-causing-headache canonical issues? Or will it just make the SERPs look pretty and consistent? I’ll let you know after the Lunch with the Google Sitemaps team today.