What Are Terminal Commands?

Your computer is a powerful tool, and can execute specific commands with very short strings of letters if you know how to reach your “Terminal”. On Mac, you can do a search for “Terminal” and access it through the sytem menu. Once the dialog shows up you can input a command like

whois seoarcade.com
ping seoarcade.com

How Does This Help My SEO?

While Andy Griffiths doesn’t line out EXACTLY why he uses these daily, we can imagine several quick uses…

There are a lot of situations where you may want to know where a domain is registered, how long it’s been registered, where (what registrar) it is registered or to whom it is registered.

You could want to find out two domains that appear spammy, are registered to the same owner for example.

The Ping function will let you test and see which IP address is responsible for the content you’re seeing in your browser. This is very useful when you’re launching new site or pages, launching redesigns or assigning new domains to a hosted site.

How Do YOU use Terminal Commands?

Would love to work out more specific uses for Ping, Whois or other commands, feel free to share details and I’ll update this post with your insights!

Keep Learning SEO

Twitter is an amazing SEO resource. These are other recaps of answers to common SEO questions or challenges I see floating around the twitterverse, to quickly vanish. Here’s are some recent #seobits I’ve created to capture these ephemeral threads for future reference.

Categories: SEObits

Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera started in SEO in 2007, working at Advanced Access a hosting company for Realtors. He came up from the support department, where people kept asking "How do I rank in Google" and found in the process of answering that question an entire career. He became SEO product manager of Homes.com, went "in-house" at Raven Tools in Nashville in 2013. He then worked at several agencies like Caddis, 2 The Top Design as an SEO manager and then launched a 5 year freelance SEO career. During that time he consulted for large enterprise sites like Smile Direct Club, Dr. Axe, HCA, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's while also helping literally hundreds of small business owners get found in search results. He has authored blog posts at Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Wix, Search Engine Land. He has been a speaker at many SEO conferences like Craft Content and been interviewed in numerous SEO focused podcasts.