HostGator has teamed up with one of our customers, BlogertizeWorld.com, to give away 30 free iPhone 3GS’s in the form of a Twitter contest.

The rules are simple and this contest is open to everyone. Click here to re-tweet the details with the hashtag #HGBW, and get entered for a chance to win. There’s no limit on the number of tweets you can submit with this hashtag, so the more submissions, the better your odds.

Don’t forget to follow @hostgator on Twitter!

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.

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!

Ever run a Google search and notice the “sponsored listings” around the search results? Ever click one of those sponsored links? It’s likely that you have already visited a link that was advertised through the Google AdWords program and now HostGator is giving its shared web hosting customers the opportunity get started with Google AdWords by giving them $25 $50 in free marketing credits*.

HostGator has partnered up with the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program and is now offering an AdWords Coupon voucher good for $25 $50 in credit with all Hatchling, Baby, and Business shared web hosting plans.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising program by Google. With AdWords, advertisers can promote their website’s products and services on Google.com’s search results in the “sponsored links” section. Quality ad text and relevant keyword buys will give you an edge over your competitors. And with AdWords, you can set your own budget and change your campaigns at any time – there are no commitments or spending requirements of any kind.

We at HostGator currently use Google AdWords for our own internal marketing efforts, and we truly believe that most businesses can benefit from the highly targeted traffic that this program can yield.

Great, how do I sign up?

New and old HostGator customers on qualifying plans can redeem the coupon code by visiting their HostGator control panel, navigating to the “Google AdWords Offer” link on the left hand side and clicking the “redeem now” link. It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t already have a HostGator web hosting account, take a look at our Shared Web Hosting plans, sign up today, and get started promoting your site!

* (the fine print our lawyers asked us to include): To read the terms and conditions as well as to learn more, visit the HostGator Google AdWords Coupon page.

Today, we’re moving forward with our commitment to the communities and the people we serve with the launch of the HostGator Technology Grant.

Recipients of the HostGator Technology Grant will receive one year of completely free web hosting with our Swamp Plan, which offers 1,000 GB of space and unlimited bandwidth. If the Swamp plan does not fit the needs of the particular recipient, they can opt to take the grant as a $180 service credit to any other HostGator product or service. After the one year of free service, grant recipients can re-apply and if accepted again, continue to use HostGator web hosting completely free.

The HostGator Technology Grant’s goal is simple and straightforward: provide free web hosting to organizations and projects that serve the greater good.

Obtaining legitimately free web hosting for nonprofits can be an arduous process. Organizations should be spending their time doing what they believe in and what they set out to do, not hunting for
affordable and quality web hosting.

The wide scope of the grant is intentional – we wanted it so all types of organizations that serve the greater good could take advantage of free HostGator web hosting. Whether your organization is nonprofit community center or a cutting edge open source project, we want to hear from you.

The application process for the HostGator Technology Grant is simple. There are just a few questions and it shouldn’t take an organization longer than 15 or 20 minutes to complete the short application. Click Here to APPLY

Once you’re all setup, then you can do your actual job and get back to doing what you love. We want to make the web hosting experience less troublesome and more convenient for everyone, including those who are seeking to better society through their organizations and projects.

If you have any questions about HostGator’s Technology Grant program, please go to http://www.hostgator.com/nonprofit-web-hosting.shtml or email techgrant@hostgator.com. We’re more than happy to help.

Processor: Intel Xeon Conroe 3060 server @ 2.4Ghz

Memory: 4GB DDR2

Hard Disk: 4 x 500GB SATA under RAID-10 configuration.

Monthly Bandwidth: 2,500GB @ 10mbps

IP Addresses: 10

OS: CentOS 4.6

Control Panel: cPanel/WHM 11 with Fantastico included.

Pricing: $350 per Month.

This is a great solution for those needing a high performance server with large data storage with redundancy. Under the RAID-10 configuration, risk of data loss would be minimized as the information is mirrored throughout all 4 hard drives. In case a hard drive fails, copies of your data should be stored on the remaining 3 hard drives. At the price of $350 per month, this server definitely provides the most bang for your buck.

This was a very popular dedicated solution when it debuted as our Pro Dedicated package, and we are very excited to be able to offer these servers to you once again. Please keep in mind that stock is limited and once we sell out, this offer will not be available for quite some time.

If you are interested in this offer, please email us at sales@hostgator.com and put it in attention to our Dedicated Sales Department.

Do you need a server fast? Your Windows server will be provisioned, secured and delivered within 24 hours of purchase, and we will provide you with monthly server management at no additional cost.

So I have given you the scoop, and now I am offering the first 5 people that purchase a Windows dedicated server from reading this blog a $100 dollar discount on your first month purchase. In order to receive this dicount you must email me at jgarcia(at)hostgator.com.

This is a first come first serve deal and this discount may NOT be combined with other offers, so if you want to get your first month at a reduced price you better act quick before its over. I will give anyone who emails me for this deal a 24 hour window to complete the purchase, then I will offer it to the next person in line.

Processor: Intel Pentium D 3.40GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Hard Disk: 250 GB
Bandwidth: 1,500 GB (10mbps)
OS: CentOS 4.5 (linux)
Control Panel: cPanel/WHM with Fantastico

We’ll be selling these for just $174/mth with basic management. If you have a look at our dedicated server page, you’ll see that our normal $174/mth server is the Basic Dedicated server. For the same price you’ll get all the same features, plus better hardware. Basically this means 2x the RAM, and 3x the Hard Disk space with a much faster processor.

This is a blog only special. The stock is available on a first come, first serve basis. Offer valid for new and existing clients that do not already have a dedicated server with HostGator. After these are sold, we won’t be able to get this server again at this price.

If you’ve been interested in upgrading to a dedicated server, please email me chad (@) hostgator.com.

About two weeks ago at the cPanel Seminar I was lucky enough to meet Keith Duncan, the Publisher of the Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine. I’ve personally have been a subscriber to Ping! Zine for over a year, and have enjoyed their articles and opinions on the industry for quite some time.

Coupon: hostgator

I hope you enjoy the magazine as much as I do, and hey, nothing beats free right? Props to Keith for getting us this great deal!

Is everyone ready for another Wordpress Plugin Competition? I know I am, especially with all the cool stuff going on around Wordpress development, this would be a good time to get the ball rolling again. This time I have some help (thanks Ajay), more readers, maybe some more sponsors, more prizes and we hope to see lots of good code, fun projects, meet lots of nice people and help the Wordpress community along the way… read more

Well, I love plugins. Whether they are for Wordpress, vBulletin, or Joomla, I hook up my scripts with plugins until they can barely function. I also know that we at HostGator are new to the blogging world, and this wouldn’t be a bad way for us to get our name out there. So after contacting Mark Ghosh, who runs Weblog Tools Collection, we decided to sponsor a few prizes for the Plugin Competition. He was thrilled to get more sponsors, and we were happy to be listed on such a big and influential Wordpress community.

To First Place: A Basic Dedicated Server for 6 months (Valued at $1,059) Pentium 4 2.8Ghz, CentOS, 1024mb Memory, 80gb SATA Hard Drive, 1500 Gigs of Bandwith per month, Cpanel/WHM Included, One free domain name for one year

To Second Place: A Swamp Hosting Plan for 1 year (Valued at $194.40), 200gb of Space, 2000gb of Bandwith, Unlimited Domains, Email, FTP Cpanel/WHM, MySQL, PHP4&5, Ruby on Rails, One free domain name for one year

To Third Place: A Baby Hosting Plan for 1 year (Valued at $134.40), 100gb of Space, 1000gb of Bandwith, Unlimited Domains, Email, FTP, Cpanel/WHM, MySQL, PHP4&5, Ruby on Rails, One free domain name for one year

Anyone who can develop a Wordpress plugin is eligible to win one of these prizes, even existing customers of HostGator. If you have something you would like to contribute, just head over to the Plugin Competition Blog.

Good luck! We can’t wait to see what kind of plugins and addons come out of this!

As seen on http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml there are a few changes!

First, starting today any new BASIC server will receive two free months of service on top of the first month of payment. That is three months of service, for the price of one!

That means if you sign up for a BASIC dedicated server today, you would not have to pay again until August 4th of 2007. That is three months of service, for the price of one. If you can find any other host in the industry that would offer something like this please let me know.

* Note that this is applicable to new servers only. Existing customers must sign up for a new server for this offer to apply. This offer does not apply to upgrades. This offer expires on 5/10/07. This offer has expired!

Second, our PRO server now comes with a choice of two configurations at signup. This will apply to all new servers, or servers that have not yet been set up and turned online. Your two options are;

At signup you can choose which setup you want in the server details. If you specify neither, you will be given 4 gigs of RAM and 4×500GIG Hard Drives by default.

This is a really great chance for any of you who are on the edge about getting a Dedicated Server, and should give you plenty of time to get things running smooth and bring in enough income to cover the cost. If you already have a Dedicated Server with us, you may want to look into moving to one of our powerhouse PRO’s. They’ll likely last you a very long time!

Hope you all enjoy the new setups, feel free to comment here or see our discussion at… the HostGator Forums.