A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based RankAbove wants to assist large websites—ones that range from 1000 pages to as far as several million—to get the most out of their SEO juice. In many ways, RankAbove is the flipside of hotshot Kenshoo, which aims at the same target market but with an SEM solution.

Launched into beta, Drive provides a complete SEO management interface, handling everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. The product begins by downloading and parsing the entire website on its servers, generating a complete analysis which is repeated upon site updates. Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling are used to determine how SEO changes will affect site pages—remember these can be in the millions—and keywords, which can reach up to the tens of thousands.

The site which is automatically divided into sections by Drive, can now be inspected for all SEO issues, with granularity reaching all the way down to single pages and individual page elements. Drive also analyzes competitor sites in order to determine the difficulty of ranking for each keyword. There is no limit on the amount of keywords and Drive will even perform automated tail keyword discovery. Testing the impact of new keywords and other SEO tweaks and fixes on the site takes minutes—an obvious plus compared to pushing it out to production and waiting for the ‘Google Dance’.

I’ve asked RankAbove to run an analysis on TechCrunch.com. Here are a few SEO basic issues it identified:

• TechCrunch rarely uses the <h1> tag. This affects proper keyword insertion in the page header tags that lets the search engines know the more relevant keywords for a particular page.
• Company Index pages all have the same title. Duplicate title issues prevent search engines from understanding which is the main page.
• Images could use better <alt> tagging. This impedes screenshots, pictures, and company logos to come up in image search results and will cause them to rank poorly for relevant searches.

Unlike most startups that begin their business from scratch, RankAbove been running an SEO consultancy business for several years. This has had multiple benefits: First, the team was able to gain product/market-fit insights from real customers. Second, the company is in a position where it can now leverage existing relationships with agencies and online retailers to establish design and beta customers, one of which is 1-800-Flowers. Finally, a major upside is that the SEO consultancy business has allowed RankAbove to self-fund development, placing it in a better negotiation position with investors. I’m told by CEO Mayer Reich, that the company is in negotiation with several investors to complete a Round A in the neighborhood of $1.5M.

I’ve been following RankAbove’s progress from the initial days of development and it’s one of the Israeli startups I’m most bullish about. Who knows, it might just be the next Kenshoo.

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Conductor markets technology which aims to empower online marketers and interactive agencies to gather reliable data on their SEO efforts, make better decisions on capturing natural search market share and accurately measure ROI for their employers or clients.

Conductor, which was co-founded by Seth Besmertnik and Jeremy Duboys back in 2005, is playing an interesting field where there’s undoubtedly still quite some room for growth, but it’s up against some stiff competition from other companies (we recently covered funding rounds for Marin Software and Kenshoo, although these focus more on the SEM i.e. paid search part of the business).

The extra funding should give Conductor some more runway to make its services stand out of the crop, and with an experienced management team, which includes former executives from ContextWeb, Apple, Yahoo! and DoubleClick, we consider the company to be a serious contestant in the space.

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As with the Series A round, this second round of funding remained undisclosed, although our contact person at the company ensures it that this was an “up-round” financing and that the valuation was “50% higher than the last time” it attracted outside capital.

The startup, based out of Tel Aviv but active worldwide, says it will use the funding to further fuel its expansion and explore new business opportunities in the search marketing space.

Kenshoo’s flagship product, Kenshoo Search, is billed as an end-to-end SEM platform and essentially automates most if not all of the work usually carried out by marketing consultants (who are of course much pricier than automation software). In that regard, Kenshoo also competes with bid-management software from all the online advertising giants (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture) but at the same time goes a step beyond that by taking a look at the quality of the campagns. Kenshoo is able to find relevant keywords across different search engines, and automatically changes campaign specifics to maximize their returns.

In the economic downturn we’re in, marketers should be focused on building or maintaining decent levels of Website traffic and drive better conversions. Search marketing is still the best customer acquisition tool in the online space, so it’s not a surprise that eMarketer predicted continued growth from 2008 to 2013 in a very recent report on the state of SEO spending in the U.S.

If Kenshoo can keep winning customers over by cutting out the middlemen and maximizing campaign ROIs, it definitely has potential to continue riding that wave and keep / make their investors happy.

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The new offer, which is basically an extension of its existing SiteCatalyst solution, is called App Measurement for iPhone and will be generally available as from January 2009. To our knowledge this is the first analytics program specifically designed for native iPhone applications, but it’s safe to say other providers will soon follow suit with similar offerings.

Update: that’s why we love commenters. Venture-backed Pinch Media also offers an analytics suite for iPhone developers.

Update 2: similar service providers include Medialets, Mobilytics, AppLoop and Mobclix.

In related news, Tel Aviv-based Kenshoo is taking its Search Engine Marketing campaign management solution mobile, enabling users to consult campaign statistics and reports from their iPhone browser. More information about their solution is available here, and a video demo can be viewed here.

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Mastery of search engine marketing is the biggest single challenge facing any marketer or advertiser. Sequoia Capital invested in Kenshoo because of its fresh approach to this task and because the company’s battle-hardened software has already paid off in thousands of different search campaigns.

Although Moritz sat on the evaluating committee, he is not the investing partner. Yuval Baharav, a partner in Sequoia’s Israeli office, is the one who invested and will take a board seat. This is Kenshoo’s first venture round. Terms were not disclosed, although one report in an Israeli paper puts it at a few million dollars. Previously, the startup raised about one million dollars from angel investors, and has been funding itself from operations. The new money will be used to make a marketing push into the UK and parts of Europe in the first quarter of 2008, and the U.S. in the second quarter.

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