RankSense Review SEO Software with Coupon
Written by Chad Bean on April 9, 2009 – 3:54 pm -HostGator has partnered with RankSense SEO Tools to give away a free 30-day trial for RankSense and a recurring 20% OFF discount, all with a 90-day money back guarantee. Use coupon code: hostgator and sign up now for the special offer. This offer is valid for all HostGator Web Hosting customers and blog readers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all the rage these days. There’s a whole market that has developed around SEO services and tools and a lot of hype and fluff that tends to confuse and complicate things for the average web site owner.
Simply put, SEO is the process of ranking higher in the search engines (Google, MSN Live, Yahoo) to increase traffic. For most websites, increased traffic translates into higher sales, so there is no disputing the importance of practicing good SEO techniques.
Since search engines have secret algorithms that determine where a website ranks in their search results, there are tons of myths and piles of misinformation out there on the ‘net. Time after time, I’ve spoken with customers who are angry and feel misled because an SEO firm or consulting company promised that the customer’s site would rank on page one in Google. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is just not possible, and the majority of these offers and promises should be quickly dismissed.
Even with all of the myths and wrong information out there, there are still some generally accepted rules and tips on how to best optimize your website to rank well. On our SEO Blog, you’ll find many articles discussing some of these proven techniques.
Not everyone can afford a reputable SEO consultant, especially for smaller websites, so most web site owners resort to the DIY methods.
One method that comes in the form of a tool and caught our attention recently is RankSense. RankSense is a piece of software that has gained a lot of popularity recently (and for good reason). This software is able to cover just about every aspect of SEO and will save you, as a site owner, tons of time.
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SEO Tools included with RankSense:
- Discover Site Rankings – See which keywords bring users to your web site and see how many conversions they get for your site.
- Search Engine Coverage – Analyze your site’s search engine visibility.
- Detect Problem Pages – Detects, follows, and checks all links and shows broken links, dynamic pages, denials in robots.txt, and other errors that may be hurting your site.
- Sitemap Builder – Creates and submits an XML sitemap for search engines to discover.
- Keyword Selection – Identify and test potential keywords.
- Keyword Appraisals – See which keywords are better based on traffic, value, search volume, and conversions.
- Competitive Intelligence – Discover your top competitors for each and every keyword.
- Analyze Competitors – Analyze competitor web sites and learn what is working for the competition.
- Analyze My Site – Understand how search engines view the keywords on your site.
- On-Page Optimization Editor – Optimize your pages to maximize search engine leads.
- Link Structure Analysis – Learn from the structure of your competitors’ backlinks.
- My Link Structure Analysis – Understand the structure of your site’s backlinks.
- Link Text Analysis – See what anchor texts link to your competitors.
- My Link Text Analysis – Analyze the anchor texts linking to your site.
- Link Research – Find the URLs that to target for link exchange, sub-categorized by type (blog, directory, article, etc).
- Task Scheduler – Allows you to schedule and automate tasks.
- Search Analytics & SEO Progress Reports – Powerful, data rich reports providing detailed filtered report providing data on every aspect of your site’s optimization including search engines, rankings, landing pages, keywords, on-page metrics, off-page metrics, keyword, competitors and much, much more.
- Advanced Preferences –Identify preferred search engines, search the API, access market analysis keywords and competitor metrics, on-page keyword analysis metrics, common words, HMTL tags weight, keyword groups, human emulation filters, report header and footer and more.
Even if you’re not sure exactly what every feature listed above does, RankSense makes it simple by offering two modes: Smart Mode (easier) and Classic mode (advanced) and it’s great at walking novices through the wizard step-by-step.
Sign up today for your free trial, and if you decide to stay, use coupon: hostgator at sign up for a 20% recurring discount, and good luck on your rankings!
Tags: ranksense, SEO
Posted in Promotions, SEO | 14 Comments »
All TPS reports require cover sheets.
Written by Douglas Hanna on April 3, 2009 – 11:53 am -
If you’ve ever seen Office Space, you most likely know that all TPS reports (that’s “Test Procedure Specification” for the uninformed) require cover sheets. The painfully ridiculous incident in the movie has become both a critical fixture of anti-corporate culture and a quintessential example of the eccentricities of bureaucracies of corporate America.
At HostGator, there are no TPS reports and cover sheets aren’t required to be put on anything. However, we do keep track of quite a few numbers and metrics and one of the metrics we do watch closely is chat volume.
The graph below is an average of the number of chats we completed per hour on any given day and at any given time throughout the month of March. The numbers are averaged, meaning that every Monday at 1 PM was averaged together to create a collective Monday at 1 PM metric. Our week-to-week variation is usually pretty negligible, so what you see on the graph is a fairly good representation of our chat volume for a given day. Note that the Y-axis starts at 30, meaning we never average less than 30 chats completed per hour.
(Click to see the full size version.)
The graph is a fairly normal distribution and makes it quite clear that we’re usually busiest right around noon central time on Mondays and Tuesdays. Our slowest times (on average) tend to be during the very early mornings on the weekends. 2 AM on Sunday is almost always dead and weekends in general tend to be fairly quiet when compared to the busy weekdays.
Keep in mind that all of these numbers are averages and they have to be taken as that. At the time of writing this post, things are actually slower than usual here. This morning was much busier than our typical Thursday morning and we only guess what tomorrow will be like. Our data indicates that it will be fairly busy for most of the day, but it could also end up being unusually quiet.
The hosting industry is an industry characterized by some amount of unpredictability. We do our best to staff our live chat and phone support departments according to the volume we’ve seen, but there are always going to be days when we’re overstaffed and days when we’re understaffed.
Unpredictability in a constantly changing industry like web hosting and at a constantly changing company like HostGator is a fact of life and much to the disappointment of the executives at Initech, not something that a cover sheet on a TPS report can mask.
Posted in Customer Service | 3 Comments »
