I got a chance to sit down with William Flaiz, VP of SEO and Web Analytics at Avenue A/Razorfish today at ad:tech Chicago to talk about its new search engine optimization technology. For those of you who don't know, Avenue A/Razorfish builds Web sites and designs digital marketing programs and has done work for a ton of companies including XM Satellite Radio and Dell. Their parent company, aQuantive, was recently acquired by Microsoft, so Avenue A/Razorfish will soon be part of the Microsoft family, as soon as that deal closes.
Today, Avenue A/Razorfish is announcing SiLC (Super-intelligent Link Crawler), an SEO tool that crawls Web sites, evaluates how well they perform and makes suggestions for improvements. It examines elements of a Web site and makes sure that search engines can crawl them properly. They have actually been testing this tool with a few different clients for the past few months. The client that we talked about was U.S. News and World Report. In just two months of work with Avenue A/Razorfish's tool, U.S. News and World Report's organic visits from Google increased by 45 percent, compared with its stats from 2006.
I know what your next question is: "Where can I find this tool to try it out on my site?" Well, that's the downside of this announcement. SiLC will remain a proprietary tool for Avenue A/Razorfish, so unless you are working directly with it as one of its clients, this tool is unavailable to you.
This decision is understandable though, since this is just another added benefit of going with them for Web design and optimization. That said, if they were to release this to the public, I think that it would be immensely popular. Who wouldn't want a 45 percent boost in visits from Google to their site? I know that Avenue A/Razorfish isn't in the business of providing their tools to the general public, but it would be really nice if they could work out a revenue model to make it happen.