WHIR tv recently sat down with Hostway (www.hostway.com) co-founder and VP John Lee and Attracta (www.attracta.com) VP Troy McCasland to discuss a partnership that will see Hostway will distribute Attracta’s automated website SEO optimization tools to its customers, via a opt-out bundling approach that will automatically offer customers a free trial of the tool.
Attracta’s tool builds an XML sitemap of a user’s website, and automatically submits that information to the major search engines (earlier this year, the company rebranded from the name Automatic Sitemap), the goal being a situation in which all the search engines have indexed all the pages on a user’s site. It also measures and provides graphical reports on that indexing.
It’s a big deal (literally) for Attracta, which will see its product exposed to Hostway’s base of more than 1.5 million customers. McCasland says during the interview that in approximately a year of operation, the company had, up to that point, acquired roughly 40,000 customers.
For Hostway, deploying Attracta is a means of serving the SEO needs of its customers. For website operators, says Lee, generating traffic is a primary concern, and not necessarily one that every small business is equipped to address in-house.
To hosting providers, Attracta is interesting as that sort of prototypical value-add – a broad, horizontally applicable revenue share designed with hosting providers in mind, with a series of levels built around the idea of the upsell, including a free sample version.
The Hostway deployment is interesting and unique for its tight integration into the Hostway control panel, as well as its use of a bundled opt-in model – every Hostway customer will get a free trial-sized deployment of the tool, which they can enhance or opt out from as they see fit.
