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Although high quality content and authoritative, relevant inbound links are the primary SEO concerns for most site owners. However, choosing an optimal web hosting service may be more important. If you don’t want to hurt your SEO, pay attention to your web hosting.
Choosing A Web Hosting That Won’t Hurt Your SEO
There are some factors of web hosting that have a real impact on the fortunes of your SEO:
Page Speed
The speed at which your page loads has an impact 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. Web speed has to do with the rate at which your site responds to web requests which can be an uphill task to improve. 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.
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
Uptime is another web hosting issue that will hurt your SEO efforts. Your SEO efforts can be hurted if you choose a web hosting service that frequently experiences server downtime. Downtime refers to the time that your website is inaccessible due to problems associated with the server that it is hosted on.
During server downtime, potential clients will be unable to access your site and the same goes for search engine bots. When a search engine bot attempts to cache your site during server downtime, it may not affect your rankings immediately. However, when this happens repeatedly, it indicates to Google and other search engines that your site may not be reliable, that it may have been inactive even between the attempted search engine bot crawls. This, understandably, can seriously damage your rankings and can even cause Google to display an “unavailable” error message as your site’s meta description in search engine results.
Location
Does the geographical location of hosting company will affect your SEO rankings? The short answer is yes, but it isn’t necessarily a top priority. As mentioned previously, your domain name is attached to an IP address. This IP address indicates the location of your FTP hosting server. If your hosting server is located in Germany, for example, Google will assume that your site caters to German Internet users. However, other factors, such as the language used on your site, can change the way that Google prioritizes search results according to location as well. This is also reflected in your site’s domain name. For example, .com sites are understood to be U.S.-focused by Google, while domains ending in co.uk generally indicate a bias for users in the United Kingdom. If your website caters primarily to customers in and around your immediate geographical location, it’s optimal to choose a web hosting service that has a server located near your area of business.
Shared Hosting Services
Many web hosting companies offer shared hosting services, which allow as many as thousands of unique domain names to exist on a single IP address and share the same pool of bandwidth and storage space. In some cases, however, using a shared hosting service that also hosts spammer websites (i.e. pornography and sites designed to trick search engine bots) can be harmful to your search engine rankings. Usually, search engine bots don’t view your site negatively if only a few spammer sites share your hosting space. However, if your website is the one of the only legitimate domains among a shared hosting service dominated by spammers, Google and other search engines may become suspicious. It’s best to ask your web hosting service for information regarding the amount of spammer sites located on their shared hosting IP addresses.
Large e-commerce sites and domains that deal primarily with multimedia often prefer dedicated hosting services that attach only one domain name to an IP address. Using dedicated server not only to avoid spammer in shared but also can improve page loading speed and overall site performance, so your SEO won’t be hurt anymore.
Technical Requirements
Every website is created with a set of technical features that makes it compatible with specific web technology operating system. There are Windows or Linux servers to choose from and your choice will come out based on your website is coded, in PHP, JSP, ASP.NET or ASP. A way of determining whether a web host is right for this 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.