We Do Search Engine Optimization.

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If you do choose this hosting plan, just plan on doing website backups yourself, as it is unrealistic to expect Anhosting to backup your lifetime collection of games, software apps, movies, torrents, mp3 music and pron.

The internet marketing directory topseos.com announced they are having a competition to allow the best search engine optimizers to show off their skills. Topseos.com is a web directory that lists SEO firms and ranks them based on how much money you give them, so in order to be in their featured SEO firm section you need to buy in. Topseos.com does list many top tier online marketing companies, but they also neglect a lot and this makes comparisons meaningless.

For a truly top list of search engine optimization firms go to SEOConsultants.com or even the marketing sherpa guide. The reason this competition is meaningless is because the best SEO’s are never going to participate with a $5000 entry fee, so by definition the winner will be picked from an extremely limited talent pool.

from the Top SEOs email:

Enter the Annual SEO & PPC Competition. Choices are good, but too many choices are confusing. Consider the confusion that your customers and potential customers go through in selecting a SEO or a PPC specialist. They are told unbelievable stories and false promises are made. There is no distinction between the leader and the laggard with everyone screaming from the same cluttered platform. Clients have been robbed of their confidence, they have bled several times. Clients in quest of the best SEO and PPC firms face a daunting task. Indeed, the question that plagues their mind is “How do I find a competent, trustworthy, and a genuine firm?”

On the other hand, companies who truly excel do not get the distinction and the overdue credit they deserve. They get mixed, classified, and lost within plenty of bogus companies with little credibility to their claims.
It’s time for strong vendors to shine in the spotlight they deserve. It’s time to add quality clients to your portfolio who seek to align with competent internet marketing service providers.

Technology alone rarely wins the day. Few companies understand this principle. A company has to believe it can vault ahead from the rest. In short, it has to become a heavyweight in the industry. Are you ready to beat competition? Do you believe your brand and your services are the ultimate trump card?
Enter the annual SEO & PPC competition. The scale is big. The competition is big, and the stakes, even bigger.

So go signup for this meaningless search engine optimization competition and spend $5000 to get an award that has no significance. True SEO specialists have no time for this kind of biased competition, and you will get much more value in your marketing career to spend this money on quality directory links or add it to your pay per click budget.

Everyone frets and worries about their website and this leads to over optimizing and spending money on useless SEO techniques. Safe yourself some money (and gray hairs!) and use this free search engine optimization advice to relax about the current state of your SERP’s.

These are 10 things you worry about with your SEO campaign but shouldn’t:

1. Obsessing about number one rankings – being #1 for one keyword is nowhere near as good as being #5 for 25 keyword phrases.
2. Focusing on PageRank – Google’s little green bar means nothing to your website. It does not control your website any more than little green men live on Mars.
3. Worrying about who is linking to you – so your enemy submitted you to 500 automated top 100 websites, spam directories, and link farms? There is no problem as long as you do not link to any of these unsavory web properties.
4. Worrying about what other people tell you – usually SEO salesman or well intentioned but misguided friends
5. Outranking Wikipedia – For most generic keyword searches Wikipedia will be in the top 5, and they may even push your website to the bottom of the search results page. There is nothing you can do about this, and the almighty Wiki is likely to remain an authority site indefinitely. Be creative, join them by submitting images to the Wiki commons and link them to your site.
6. Trying to rank in Microsoft/Yahoo/Ask – they don’t matter, really. Google is the traffic king.
7. Banging your head over DMOZ listings – DMOZ is a powerful free directory – or not. DMOZ editors ignoring your passionate pleas? Join the club. The web is simply too big for the volunteer editors to handle so the open directory is becoming less relevant, and this trend will continue into the future. A better idea is to be listed in smaller topical directories that are directly related to your website.
8. Meta Tags – using a meta description will allow you to control your website snippit, but meta keywords are as useless as shoes on a fish.
9. Stressing over Alexa or Compete.com rankings – Seriously would you trust a robot to run your business or make decisions for you? These automated systems make sweeping generalizations about web traffic and are only accurate for spproximately the top 5000 web properties.
10. Changing rankings & temporary position loss – change happens, and this can be a good thing. Google is constantly refining the way they count and score backlinks and evaluate duplicate content, so as long as your links come from trusted quality sources and you only use original copy any rankings drop should only be temporal

More details courtesy of SEL.

One of the latent myths of SEO is the need for a dedicated IP address. This search engine optimization falsehood was started in the late 1990′s and spread by many highly visible SEO’s including Bruce Clay’s inaccurate information.

There is absolutely no need to get a dedicated IP address or a dedicated server for web hosting. You would share a C block IP with your neighbors in a datacenter, and you have absolutely no control of virtual neighbors. If search engines penalized or promoted websites based on their IP address, then IP’s would be more valuable than domain names and blackhat spammers would have a field day holding innocent webmasters hostage.
Imagine this scenario, you are randomly assigned 216.218.255.166 and a site in the same web hosting rack is assigned IP 216.218.255.165 and they are hosting hardcore pornography on a different server. Your website content may be rainbows and unicorns, but the neighboring C Class server could be hosting P2P warez and hate speech. Should Google or any other search engine make an association

Read Matt Cutts dispel the need for a dedicated IP address.

More of the science behind IP addresses:

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 2⁸ or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 2³² or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!

Out of the almost 4.3 billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address 0.0.0.0 is reserved for the default network and the address 255.255.255.255 is used for broadcasts.

Rest assured, you do not need a unique IP address to rank well in search engines. Anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed or wants profit from selling you expensive dedicated web hosting.

Behold the spinning dancer, a dark female silhouette on a white background. Watch as she gracefully spins with computer animated wonder.

This post has nothing to do with search engine optimization, it is just a cool image. Most people (myself included) will see the dancer spinning from left to right, clockwise. You have excess spleen qi in your left frontal crockus. This means that you’re a vibrant personality whose passions are apparent to everyone around you, but sometimes you are indecisive.

If you see her spinning counter-clockwise, the right ascension of your natal chart lies in your sagittal broab – don’t panic it’s ok. Just watch this awesome 1970′s educational video explaining brain chemistry and everything will fall into place.

The spinning dancer is an example of something called bistable perception. As an object that can be seen in either of two ways, it’s in the same class of illusion as the Necker cube and the face-vase.

Your visual system has evolved to construct a reasonable mental image of the world with a limited amount of information, and it uses a dizzying array of assumptions to do so. In the natural world these assumptions are mostly valid, and there’s only one right way to interpret any given set of signals. Artists and sundry neuroscientists, however, can consciously exploit the assumptions your brain makes about the objects it’s looking at to produce images with two or more equally valid interpretations.

When presented with stimuli that have two valid, mutually contradictory interpretations, your brain just picks one. Then, sometimes, it picks the other. We still don’t understand why this happens, or what role conscious efforts might play in this shift in perception. Many people are able to make the dancer shift directions at will, but the strategies I’ve seen almost always invoke a change of focus – I shift my attention to her feet, or scroll up and down, others look at her hands or to her side.

See more of the explanation from Gabbro.

Google introduced their entry into the mobile phone world 11/5/07 with the gPhone. The gPhone will not be a piece of hardware with standard mobile service, but a software platform and operating system on an open platform called Android running Linux that can run mobile Google apps and programs from developers. Google has created the software to run a cellphone and is licensing this to 34 mobile phone handset makers and cell providers including T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel, NTT Docomo, China Mobile, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Qualcomm, Intel.

Notably absent from this mobile consortium are Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, or Nokia (which has its own Ovi mobile development platform).

“This is not an announcement of a Gphone. We hope thousands of different phones will be powered by Android. This will make possible all sorts of applications that have never been made available on a mobile device.” The software development kit will be available on November 12, but this announcement really falls short of expectations.

Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google thinks a lack of a collaborative effort is what has been keeping back the mobile Web. Android will help developers reduce complexities and costs across different mobile devices, very similar to the OpenSocial software foundation Google announced for web based social networks. Predictably, Android and OpenSocial will work seamlessly together, just like Microsoft Windows and Office software.

Google really tried to sugar coat this announcement, but quite soon we may be seeing another result of Google’s application development framework: monopoly.

The Gphone is the hot topic of the blogosphere today. Read more from the Google conference call here.

Matt Cutts states that purchased links or text links ads are detected and given no ranking value about 95% of the time. It could be that Google is closer to detecting 99% of paid links. In general, it is link sellers who will be penalized, and often suffer a pagerank drop.

There are 2 reasons to buy links: for direct clickthrough traffic and for a ranking boost.
I believe that links purchased for click traffic rather than for natural rank increase have the potential to also positively increase position if it is done on similar themed websites that are natural link partners.

An example of a link that probably would not coult is a link from the stanford daily online. Links from newspapers and content sites are generally not trusted as the link advertisers are completely unrelated and have no editorial value to the site.

A quality paid link on a local California site or directory for a business that provides a service directly to California residents would likely be high quality and extremely valuable to users. In this case the link would likely increase pagerank, or natural ranking.

When linking think of the signal of intent and contextual relevance. It is linker beware in this unsafe arena of paid links and link brokering.

Google  has created an all encompassing programming API that will allow webmasters to share social applications between services. Partners include MySpace.com, Beebo.com, Ning.com, Engage.com, Friendster.com, hi5.com, Hyves.com, imeem.com, LinkedIn.com,  Oracle.com, orkut.com, Plaxo.com, Salesforce.com, SixApart.com, Tianji.com, Viadeo.com, and XING.com.

This is a huge list of major web services companies  and web 2.0 sites that attract young users to socialize, chat, download music and write personal blogs.

Notably missing is the hottest social networking company of the moment, Facebook.com.

See why this is checkmate for facebook and why they may be forced to join the Google brigade.

Search engine optimizers and online marketers are drooling at the possibility of monetizing these millions of international internet users.