(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Due to rapid adoption of its search visibility technology by websites and channel partners such as Hostway, AutomaticSiteMap rebranded last month as Attracta (www.attracta.com), a name that suits a company that helps drive traffic to websites worldwide.
“We just started having tremendous success with our promise, and we realized from the beginning that Automatic Site Map wasn’t the type of global brand that we were looking for . . . it was really just a placeholder until we got traction and momentum,” Attracta business development vice president Troy McCasland says regarding the name change.”In the short time we’ve been in business – less than six months – we’ve managed to collect over 35,000 clients, who use our service to get more traffic.”
Last month, Hostway Corporation (www.hostway.com) became the first major web host to integrate Attracta’s new direct XML Sitemap submission technology into its hosting offerings, providing all of Hostway’s 1.5 million retail and channel customers with Attracta’s basic service level at no cost – a savings of $60 per year per customer.
“Web hosting is really a commodity right now,” McCasland says, “and in the past the biggest differentiator was price. If you look at the leaders and early adopters, like Hostway, they recognize hosting is a commodity and the only way to really win the game and capture more customers is to differentiate yourself with value-added services, and that the leaders have recognized that search engine optimization is one of the key components that people that have websites want.”
He says that, because the most important thing to website owners is traffic, and that SEO drives that traffic, this is a service in universal demand.
And while SEO services have been around in one form or another for years, Attracta is more – ahem – attractive from an industry perspective because it is delivered as software as a service, so clients do not have to install or configure it, giving it a broader mass appeal. Also, advanced users can tailor the service with great granular control
While McCasland noted that SEO plug-ins for content management systems like WordPress or Drupal do a similar job in terms of building a sitemap to get the attention of search engines, there are several ways in which Attracta gives users more information and control.
“In the technical perspective, our product is superior because of the dashboard and the reporting and the amount of control and flexibility you have with this system and with this solution,” he says. “Technically, they’re doing similar things. Drupal and the WordPress plug-in create the site map . . . and site maps are submitted using a method called ‘ping.’”
Attracta also lets a business apply SEO best practices across their entire roster of clients, which is much simpler than applying SEO strategies individually for each user.
The primary difference, however, is metrics.
“Our solution has is the dashboard, error reporting, the traffic tracking, measuring the results over time. and with any type of marketing activity . . . if you’re not measuring your results, you really don’t know where you’re headed. You’re just kind of flying blind with a Drupal or a WordPress plugin.”
No related posts.
