SEO Hosting Blog

It’s not hard to understand why link requests have gotten a bad reputation. Whether you receive them as a personal message in a forum, or get them sent directly to your email inbox, anybody who owns a website or is involved in Internet marketing has gotten more spammy link requests than they can count.

The spammy link requests that I am talking about are the ones with a title along the lines of “Trade Links!” and that look like:

Dear Webmaster,

Good day to you!

Whether they are using an automated program to send these requests on a massive scale, or are taking the time to copy and paste this message into each email, as soon as you see this email (if it hasn’t already been flagged by your spam filter), you are going to hit Delete.

(more…)

Since you are reading this blog, I would guess that it’s safe to assume that your feed reader is filled with at least a couple of SEO blogs. Because of this, you have probably read about plenty of the SEO tools that are out there. I have written posts before that profile different SEO tools, and so have plenty of other SEO bloggers.

Normally, I wouldn’t devote an entire post to just one SEO tool. However, it wasn’t until recently that the tool I’m going to discuss today came across my radar. The reason that this surprised me is because it looks like an extremely useful tool, and it surprised me that I haven’t seen more SEO bloggers talking about it.

The SEO tool that I want to talk about is Raven SEO Tools. The reason that I like this tool so much is that it makes so many of the common SEO tasks more efficient. Obviously, SEO isn’t something that you can fully automate (unless you are foolish enough to think that SEO is nothing more than doing a bunch of automated directory submissions), but with a tool like this, you can operate a lot more efficiently.

(photo by shelly_dennison)

The Raven SEO Tools seem to cover just about every area of the SEO process. The features that these tools offer cover a wide range, including Research & Analysis, Campaign Management, Content Management, SERP Tracking, Analytics & ROI and Campaign Reports. This set of tools even has functionality that allows it to be used in an agency or enterprise environment.

To give you an example of what I was talking about when I said that this tool can make you a more efficient SEO, let’s look at one of its Research & Analysis features. Instead of needing to manually visit multiple keyword tool, Raven brings a lot of the best keyword tools (including Wordtracker, SeoDigger and AdWords) together for you to use from one place.

Another of the features that looks really cool is the SERP Tracker. Not only does this allow you to monitor keyword performance, but it also allows you to monitor trends over time, which can be really useful in measuring the effectiveness of specific elements of your SEO campaign.

Also, if you are into competitive analysis, this tool gives you the ability to automatically track how your competitors are performing.

Obviously, since I haven’t actually used this tool yet, it wouldn’t make sense for me to recommend that you sign up for one of the paid memberships. However, I will recommend that you do the same thing I’m about to do, which is to sign up for a free account and see how well these tools work. I’m interested to see if this tool lives up to all of the claims that it makes, and if it does, while $500 or $1,500 a month may seem like a really steep price tag, I could see this tool paying for itself many times over.

If you have personal experience using the Raven SEO Tools, I would love for you to leave a comment and tell us what you think about them!

I’m not writing this as a purely promotional post for SEOHosting (at least not entirely).  But I have seen a lot of confusion out there – especially among new website owners – about the difference between C Class IP web addresses, one of the major things offered by SEO Hosting.  It’s core to optimizing a fleet of websites.

When I first started in the SEO biz, I was in the business of creating dummy sites that would all link to the same central website.  This was early on in SEO when Google was not nearly as strict as it is today.  Creating these ghost sister sites are considered a form of spam, a variant on a link farm.  Even if the sites have original content, Google frowns on a series of sites all linking repeatedly to the same site – especially if those sites all exist on the same IP.

(more…)

When I was going through the SEO Hosting comments that were being held in moderation, I came across these two gems:

Normally, comment spam doesn’t get my attention, but I thought it was strange to receive comment spam from the same IP address for two social communities (instead of the normal pharmaceutical spam).

Out of pure curiousity, I decided to run the IP address through the DomainTools Whois.  The IP address resolved to TATACOMM-IN, which is an ISP in India.  If you have ever visited the services forum of a forum like Digital Point, you know how many individuals and companies there are in India that offer “mass blog commenting” services.

Because it seemed unlikely that an individual or company in India would randomly submit comment spam on behalf of two social communities, I wanted to see if there was any relation between SiteProNews and DropJack.  I began by using SEOQuake to see if the two sites were hosted on a shared IP address; however, DropJack has its own IP address and the only other website on the SiteProNews website is a domain that redirects back to SiteProNews.

Although they had individual IP addresses, I noticed something interesting when I pulled up DropJack in Yahoo! Site Explorer:

(more…)

Last month, Eric Enge published a lengthy interview with SEO expert Bruce Clay. Not only does Bruce Clay run one of the industry’s largest SEO companies, but he is also well respected within the SEO community.

Like most of Eric Enge’s interviews, this one contained a lot of great information, but it can take some time to read through the entire interview and find the most informative parts. So, since I know all of our readers are very busy people, I’ve dissected the interview and pulled out the ten best tips that Bruce Clay has to offer:

1. When it comes to SEO ethics, the discussions within the SEO community usually focus only on “black hat vs. white hat.” If you have ever spent your time reading any of these discussions, they normally go nowhere and accomplish nothing new. I think Bruce Clay made a more meaningful point about SEO ethics in one sentence than most of these discussions make in multiple pages: “SEO ethics is fundamentally about doing no harm to your client.”

2. Uneducated permission is not the same as permission. If you know a practice is unethical but an uninformed client still thinks it’s OK, you need to use your personal judgment and avoid implementing this practice. Bruce used the example of Traffic Power, which helped its clients increase their ranking through the use of cloaking. This company preyed on its clients’ ignorance, and was eventually put out of business by Google for spamming.

3. “Do things naturally.” Although this seems like common sense, there is a large portion of the SEO world that does not seem to follow this advice. Instead of trying to deceive the search engines, focus on achieving results through techniques that search engines do not frown upon.
(more…)