Photoshop is now available as an online service in the form of Photoshop Express. I'll be back soon with some more info once I've tested it out...

Labels: design, services

Google Analytics has become the weapon of choice for one of my clients as it does an admirable job of splitting their paid and non-paid traffic, particularly helpful seeing as they're runnning an Adwords campaign or two.

Today I noticed in Google Analytics' menu there's a Benchmarking (Beta) button under the Visitors heading.

"Benchmarking is a service that lets you see how your website's statistics compare against industry verticals. Use benchmarking data to gain a broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics."

Getting further into the Benchmarking (Beta) I had to allow Google to anonymously collect & share data and I've enabled Benchmarking (Beta) for the client's site. When I attempt to use the service, Google's now telling me that benchmarking data is being collected & combined and that

"Industry statistics will appear in this report within two weeks"

Tres cool, now I just have to sit and wait for up to 2 weeks to see how this site is performing against industry verticals. And this is where I'm very curious... Not knowing how Google knows which industry you're in I did a little search amongst all their FAQs and it appears that you have to set the industry vertical yourself... by going into "Open category list" and selecting a category... and yet I'm not seeing that function either in Firefox or my IE6 browser.

This is going to be interesting comparing visits, page views per visit, bounce rate and average time on site with others in the industry... I wonder how we will fare? I'll keep you posted.

Labels: google, seo, services, stats, tools

What a great idea. SEOHosting.com

What's the crack with this and what the hell does SEO have to do with hosting?

Well, certain search engines, that we won't mention, look at the IP address of where sites are hosted and factors this into their ranking algorithm. What they specifically look at is the class C IP address, so for this site with the current IP address 70.85.48.84 the class C IP is 70.85.48.

If the search engines see links between any of these class C IP addresses then the links are quite simply devalued. I once knew a guy in the US who, many years ago, hooked onto the fact that links boost sites and created something like over 300 sites with virtually no content, all linking to eachother.

Now, the SEs aren't daft so they introduced this cross-linking detection which stops someone setting up hosting on a reseller package and creating tons of sites that all link to eachother.

That's bad news if you're legitimately building sites on the cheap and you find genuine value of linking to other sites, especially if they're in the same arena e.g. you link one Automotive site to another, or you're a designer hosting your clients' sites on your reseller account, pointing to them from your portfolio and having them point back to you.

It's good news if you're a hosting company because to avoid class C IP penalties you'd have to spread your sites over different servers far apart, at different companies etc. For the small fish inthis big pond, that can be quite a pricey problem.

That's where SEO Hosting comes in: SEOHosting.com from Hostgator specifically has a number of class C IP addresses where you can avoid these penalties... for now ;)

So, from an SEO point of view you can optimise, promote, build links and not worry (too much) about Class C IP penalties.

Labels: hosting, seo, server, services

Here at 22i design we offer a number of services from hosting to web design, graphics to search engine optimisation etc. We've always written our own content too and we run a number of other sites where we write regular copy.

Since the beginning of September 2007 we've been writing daily Small Business News for the is4profit small business website, so feel free to take a look. Apart from a short holiday period we've written every day and have provided not only new, relevant and unique information but also boosted the site's traffic with just one new page a day :)

Labels: copy writing, services