I talked yesterday about IP address SEO and how it affects rankings. In this article I’ll cover how to use a proxy and the important reasons and situations to do it. Any substantial amount of activity which occurs through one IP address will look suspicious which is why a lot of online marketers in particular use proxies to camouflage their activity. Proxies are especially helpful when doing automated tasks whether that’s automated link building, automated social network interaction, etc.

How to Use a Proxy

Online marketers use automated software because it expedites and automates a lot of their work for them, saving them a great deal of time. There are some tools which are considering borderline or completely black hat, but there are also a lot of tools which do things which you would be doing yourself or outsourcing to someone else to do, so it’s just a time saving cost effective alternative.

Using proxies to perform these tasks, it looks more natural as if you have people all over the country (wherever the proxy/proxies you’re using are located). This is important because search engines hate it when someone appears to be attempting to manipulating search engine rankings in their favor through black hat SEO techniques.

It’s painfully obvious that all of this activity is coming from the exact same IP address without using proxies. Using proxies masks your activities and again gives the impression that they are spread out and being carried out by multiple parties around the country or even the world so that it’s much more difficult to detect.

How Do Proxies Work?

Most any software which performs automated tasks in your stead for you will have the option of enabling you to use proxies while it performs those tasks. You take your list of proxy IP addresses and their corresponding codes and import that directly into whatever software you’re using so the program can perform those tasks by connecting to and behind the safety of your private proxies.

What is the Best Private Proxy Service?

There are lots of different proxy services out there which charge you generally a small monthly fee to allow you the use of their proxies for your tasks. I like to use BuyProxies both because they are very affordable and I’ve never had an issue with any of their proxies not working for me which is an issue sometimes when it comes to proxies.

If they do send you a dead proxy in the package you order you can just contact them to be sent an immediate fresh package of proxies.

They have a number of different proxy packages which each have you paying less and less as you upgrade to larger proxy packages. In my experience if you’re just using automated software on your own computer and it’s just you using them, you really only need the smallest and cheapest package of 10 proxies for $10.

That works out to be $1 per proxy on the shared account which for most purposes is all you’ll need.