I'm with Deeplist. SEO is a complete and total scam.
How many "SEO Experts" talk about IP classes (which haven't been relative since the early 90's), and dedicated IPs, which Google themselves have said years ago have no bearing upon SEO ranking? But people still believe this nonsense, and pay HUGE money for such SEO services. Further, as Deeplist says, what would happen if everybody would do the same SEO? Everyone can't be ranked #1.
The fact of the matter is that the only SEO is content. If you have what people want and churn thousands of visitors to your site, you are going to be ranked high in the search engines. There's no magic behind it.
Especially in this industry, you are not going to be in the top few pages, period. You have the GoDaddy's, the 1&1's, Bluehosts, etc., and they aren't ranked in the top of the search engines because they use good SEO practices. They are there because they have billions of dollars to spend on advertising, and they attract millions of users to their sites. You, no matter how good your SEO, are not going to appear in the search engines before, with, or anywhere near them.
So we don't worry about that. Like Deeplist, the majority of our clients don't come from search engines. I don't know of a single one that has, and that doesn't bother me in the slightest. We have done business locally for almost 20 years, and that's what we depend on. When it comes to getting random clients from the Internet, it's all about innovation, and it's all about service. We were one of the first 3 companies to offer pure SSD VPSs, and our benchmarks were always in the top. We got a HUGE amount of business from that, and continue to today. It's about word of mouth, and it's about being innovative. And with that comes quality service. While we might not be the cheapest, we provide darn good service.
And I realize this is a free hosting forum, and a lot of what I said applies to paid hosting. But free hosting isn't much different. You have to be innovative, you have to have a niche. Look at Youhosting. I'll badmouth them all day long. But at the end of the day, you sure can't argue how many clients they have. They were innovative, they filled a niche, and they're a huge contender.
It's all business practice. There's nothing in hosting that's different from running any other business, and there's certainly no magic SEO bullet that's going to get you all the clients.
