How Web Hosting Affects SEO

If spreading awareness, growing your brand, increasing traffic and profitability is the question then web presence is the answer. Almost every businessperson is now fully aware of the need to take on the Internet with a combined and refined set of tools that place you favorably against your competition. In this mission, getting there has the same importance as how you get there and one crucial decision has to do with your web hosting choice.

A lot of people are of the notion that all web hosting service providers and packages are the same, which results in a failure to make comparisons between different services and packages that are on the market. You need a website that will rank favorably on major search engines for your web presence to count for anything and poor hosting services will compromise that mission.

In this quest, it is totally self-defeating to devote all your time, energy, and resources to please crawlers and spiders yet turning a blind eye to the users whose experience matter in the grand equation. What pleases the user pleases the bots and gives you good rankings. True to Matt Cutt’s words: “digital marketers should think of SEO as being Search Experience Optimization.”

What Are The Web Hosting Factors That Have A Bearing On SEO?

There are 3 factors of web hosting that have a real impact on the fortunes of your SEO, namely:

Page speed
Uptime and downtime
Location

Page Speed

The speed at which your page loads has a bearing on the ranking of your website. This fact was revealed by Google in the year 2010, making speed one of the nearly 200 factors that go into the determination of your ranking. Overall, this constitutes a small percentage but does not mean you should turn a blind eye to the speed of your website. The trend so far has been the total disregard of this aspect which has been largely left to CRO experts and Web designers.

Web speed has to do with the rate at which your site responds to web requests which can be an uphill task to improve.Google incorporates user experiences into the ranking of your site and it naturally follows that there is nothing amusing about a slow website. Users detest slow websites and so does Google. They are fraught with bounce rates and diminished user engagement as well as little average time on page. The speed of your site also has a bearing on the indexing that it enjoys.

Search engines regularly crawl your website, and if some pages cannot be accessed due to a compromised speed then the rankings of the respective keywords will suffer. A fast loading website ensures that most if not all of the pages are indexed during your Googlebot crawl budget, which might not be much depending on your sites trust and authority. To get a true picture of the speed of your site, you can use a number of free tools such as:

Page Speed
YSlow
Pingdom Tools
GTmetrix
WEBPageTest

Not every incidence of a slow website can be attributed to your web host. You must realize that other factors such as the coding of your site, un-optimized images, excessive fancy flash, external embedded media, and spam can also result in the slowing of your website.

Uptime and Downtime

Uptime and downtime is another web hosting issue that has a strong bearing on your SEO efforts. Downtime refers to the time that your website is inaccessible due to problems associated with the server that it is hosted on.  Search engine crawlers and spiders will try to visit your website on numerous occasions in a single day. If your website is down, then the situation is noted and they move to other sites.

If this scenario avails on a frequent basis then your website will ultimately be flagged as being unreliable which has the effect of bringing down your rankings.  A situation whereby unreliable websites receive favorable rankings is untenable for the Search Engines as it makes them look bad and unreliable as well. The demotion is thus done to ensure that all pages that are ranked highly can be opened when users click on the links.

Other Factors

Other factors that can affect the performance of your website include the distance between you and your host as well as the capacity of the host. Far away servers result in greater downtimes while oversubscribed host services can have the same effect including terrible speeds.

What to Do

The best way of ensuring that you don’t fall into any of these nasty scenarios is to exercise due diligence when you seek out web hosting services. There are a number of factors that you have to consider, namely:

Operating system
Bandwidth
Configuration
Support services

Every website is gifted with a set of technical features that makes it compatible with specific web technology operating system. There are Windows and Linux servers to choose from and your choice will have a lot to do with whether your website is coded in PHP, JSP, ASP.NET or ASP. You also have to pay special attention to the hosting packs bandwidth of your service provider. This must be done holistically taking into account the physical characteristics of the host’s server as well as its limitations and various other services.

Larger web hosting companies tend to be open with such information which makes the assignment much easy for you. Another way of determining whether a web host is right for your requirements is to take a closer look at their server’s configuration settings as well as the time limits, server versions and installed libraries. Your final choice of a web hosting services provider must be one that offers overwhelming technical support.

This is ensures that any glitch that is experienced is only momentary and does not eat away your SEO efforts. When you select the service that you want from the various packages available, it is preferable to opt for a dedicated IP address than to go for a shared option. Your IP address, and a couple of other factors, will also be used by Google in determining your location for ranking purposes.

Conclusion

As we go deeper into 2014, SEO is slowly pushing out those playing a chancing game. The playing field is being leveled and only a true white hat approach, experience, research and a comprehensive appreciation requisite tactics will see you through on your goals.

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