Desert Web Designs Blog

Here’s a situation I seem to come across on a pretty regular basis:

“I’ve gone through and optimized my website for the keywords that I want, and I’m still not getting the traffic I think I should be getting (or the traffic that I expected, or wanted, etc). How come?”

Read through that quote again closely, and see if you can figure out the problem. Did you find it? Ok, I’ll help. The customer/client is using “the keywords that I want.” The problem here is that the customer is optimizing for the keywords that he wants to get listed under. What he should be targeting is the keywords that his potential clients are searching for. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve optimized your site, if you’re not targeting the keywords your customers are searching for.

I recently came across an excellent article about this topic from Terri Wells of Developer Shed* titled Think Like a Searcher to Increase Your Traffic. Terri has written a number of great articles for SEO Chat which I would highly recommend checking out. In that article, Teri mentions “SEOs and site owners fight hard to get a top position on the search engine results pages for their chosen keywords. But that’s only half the battle at best……if we’re building and optimizing our sites for Google’s eyes alone, we’re only doing half the job.” So, it doesn’t matter if you rank #1 for every term you’re targeting if no one is searching for that particular keyword. Remember, our ultimate goal is making our site as visible as possible to searchers. I would rather take a lower ranking for a keyword that is searched more often, than a higher ranking for a keyword that is searched less often. Teri makes an excellent argument about this point specifically in her article. #1 isn’t always the best.

This obviously begs the question “How do I know what Mr. Customer is searching for?” There are tons of free keyword suggestion tools out there including Word Tracker that can assist with finding that out. We also offer a tool called Traffic Blazer starting at $29.99/year which not only contains a keyword suggestion tool powered by Yahoo! Search Marketing, but it also has a keyword analysis which will assist you in making sure that you are targeting the keywords you have selected correctly, search engine submission links, reporting features, and more.

In closing, the main point to take from this is: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You have to put your wants/needs aside. You will serve yourself and your website better by optimizing for the keywords your customer is searching for as opposed to the keywords that you would like to see yourself listed under and ultimately see better traffic results.

*For those of you unfamiliar with Developer Shed, they manage “20 high-technology websites collectively known as the Developer Shed Network.” There are many fabulous websites, many of which I frequent myself including Dev Articles, SEO Chat, Tutorialized, and Codewalkers. These are all sites I highly recommend and are worth checking out and worthy of being included in your bookmarks.

A question I’m often asked at work (tech support/sales for a major internet software company) by other tech support reps is, “Does having a shared hosting IP affect Search Engine Ranking?” Often times they are asking, because our customers are asking them, and for whatever reason, I’m considered the resident SEO expert for my team. I’ll admit I do know SEO, but not sure if I’m quite at the point where I would consider myself an “expert” per se. Anyways, it’s nice to get the compliment.

The long and short of this answer is “No! Having a shared IP address will not adversely affect your search engine ranking.”

The flip side to this question is “Will having a dedicated/unique IP address help my search engine ranking?” Again, the answer to this question is a resounding “No! Having a dedicated IP address will not give you a boost in the search engine rankings.”

Now are their benefits to having dedicated IP addresses? Yes. Are their SEO benefits to having a dedicated IP address? Minimal at best. Will it hurt you by not having one? No.

In a 2003 interview with Slashdot, Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein answered this specific question accordingly:

Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception.

Now I know some of you skeptics out there may be thinking “Well that was 5 years ago, that’s a long time ago in a rapidly changing environment such as the internet.” And you’d be right. It’s very likely that in 5 years Google has changed their ranking algorithm. However, at the end of 2006, Google software engineer and head of their Webspam team, Matt Cutts answered that question in his blog post “Myth busting: virtual hosts vs. dedicated IP addresses”

There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP)…I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.

While searching for these articles, I came across another blog post from SEO/SEM specialist Jim Boykin who takes the exact opposite approach in his blog post “SEO Tip - Get Your Own IP Address.” Jim recommends getting your own dedicated IP address for every website you own. Now obviously I’m in no position to argue with someone who has been doing this much longer than me, but the fellows at Google are. I’m not saying that Jim is wrong, all I’m saying is his advice contradicts the information from Craig and Matt.

Looking at the PageRank of Jim’s site versus mine, Jim’s site reports a PageRank of 5 while mine shows a PageRank of 3. Now there are some other contributing factors here. Primarily the fact that Jim’s site has been around 2 years longer than mine which gives more time to link build and gain PageRank. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for me to have a higher PageRank than Jim, I just don’t put much time into the marketing of my site because of the workload I have. It would not be beneficial to myself or my clients (current or future) to actively advertise and gain more work at this time. I’m not trying to make excuses for my lower PageRank, just stating the facts. But I don’t think that the dedicated IP address accounts for the difference.

In closing:
Are there web site benefits to having a dedicated IP address: Yes.
Are there SEO benefits to having a dedicated IP address: No.