Hi all,

Thought I'd post an SEO tip :)

When a search engine spiders your website, the first thing it looks at is the host. After checking this, the search engine will resolve your domain to an IP and cross reference this in it's database.

The reason search engines do this is to limit, or reserve listings for new sites. Not to say that if your linkbacks are plentiful, generally a shared IP address (what all hosts 9 times out of 10 initially provide on signup) will carry thousands of sites depending on the server size and capacity.

Search engines like Google are smart, but not that smart :) When it picks up a shared IP, it will categorize your site initially towards the back of list - The reason? Some hosts post multiple blogs / domain pointers in order to gain traffic and clever search engines will limit these.

So, the best thing to do if you take your rankings seriously is to go with a static IP address to gain a higher initial ranking.