Guest post by: Dan Silber
VP of Sales
HostDime has partnered with Attracta to provide all customers on our Shared and Reseller servers a free SEO plugin for cPanel.
A few quick facts about local search and advertising:
A recent report by comScore for Yellow Pages Association shows that the number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in March 2010.
It is also estimated that 95% of Google’s Revenue comes from it’s Google AdWords service. That means in Q3 of 2010 advertisers spent roughly $3 billion on paid advertising through Google and it’s affiliated sites.
Why is this important?
These days local businesses are learning the importance of being found online and how much of an increase in business the online exposure can bring. You’ve taken the first step in building your website and hosting it with HostDime but that doesn’t mean potential customers will find your site naturally (natural is organic discovery search and not paid targeted ads). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims to address that problem, however businesses can find themselves paying thousands of dollars each month just to attempt to get at the top of Google for keywords related to their business.
With Attracta’s SEO plugin you gain access to a wide array of tools to get your business found naturally online. Through HostDime’s partnership with Attracta we are able to provide you and your clients a free trial of their software which includes one XML site map submission to all the major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!). Attracta will crawl your site and gather data about every page on your site and submit a map of your site to the search engines so you can be assured that they know where all your pages are and add them to their index to be found by potential customers.
With all the data Attracta collects about your site they can tell if if there are any broken links on your site, which refers to linking to a page that doesn’t exist or if you are blocking access to that page. Any broken or inaccessible URLs means that the search engines cannot index them and customers can’t find them meaning a potential loss of business for yourself.
Meta tags are usually added to the header section of every page on your site. With meta tags you can specify keywords and a description that is relevant to that page on your site which gives the search engines hints on what you would like users to search for to find your page. With Attracta’s SEO Plugin you can get a quick overview of any pages that are missing these tags, any pages that have duplicate tags, or any pages that have meta tags following bad practices. It will also give you the same data about Title tags on your pages which are equally as important to showing the search engines how users should be finding your page.
With the Free version of the Attracta SEO Plugin you will be provided with a list of links to pages to manually submit your site to all the local search directories including: Google Places, Local Yahoo, Bing Local, Yelp, YellowPages, and many more. With the paid version of the plugin Attracta will automatically submit your site to these local directories and 80+ other top local search engines and directories including in-car navigation systems and mobile 411 listings.
Get free status reports on your progress with the Attracta SEO plugin. You can see when the major search engines have last visited your site to crawl your pages. Easily view your SEO scorecard and decide which areas of your SEO campaign still need more work and focus.
Every business should leverage the power of social media sites like twitter and Facebook. Aside from the SEO value, social media sites allow you to interact with your customers in real time but also discover new potential customers and introduce them to your products. With Attracta’s SEO plugin you can begin to harness the power of Twitter and Facebook and easily manage your accounts.
If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization and need help getting started Attracta’s SEO plugin has got your covered. They have an extensive library of help tutorials that cover everything from Getting Started to learning how exactly Google ranks sites in its index. Attraca’s SEO Plugin has a list of Google Webmaster videos made by Google employees themselves with great tips to help get your site ranked for your chosen keywords.
In the end it’s all about optimizing your site so that the search engines find that your page is relevant to the topic of your choice and ranks your pages higher which leads to more opportunities for conversions and sales. Search Engines want to direct users to the site that they feel is most relevant to the terms they are searching for. Using Attracta’s SEO Plugin you and your clients can begin this process of optimizing your site for the Search Engines and you can show your awareness of SEO with the Attracta SEO Badge.
To being using this plugin simply login to cPanel for your domain (ex. yourdomain.com/cpanel) and click the Get In Google button. If you do not see this in your profile please contact our support team so we can look into the issue.
i use it before and i think it's very useful,