Web Hosting and SEO

Contrary to the popular belief – web hosting has everything to do with Search Engine Optimisation, because they have a direct relationship.

So what is the relationship between Web Hosting and SEO?

To have a good and reliable web hosting service/package could very well be the final push that is needed to get your website ranking on the top spots for certain search terms. There are more factors than just price that you need to ask or look for when you are choosing your web hosting company.

The server reliability is a very important feature that you would need to be mindful of. Here are a couple of issues that you have to know in order to help you make a well-informed decision in relation to your Web Hosting Plan:

1. Your IP address

If your web hosting company uses a shared IP address, it means that your website will have the same IP address as a bunch of other websites. This could potentially be a problem for your SEO Campaign. If the other website is de-indexed or penalized by Google for a black hat techniques then you might suffer the same fate.

2. Downtime and crawlers

Search Engine uses crawlers to index the entire World Wide Web and we do not know when it will happen therefore it is recommended have a minimal downtime. If your website is down when the crawler gets there then all recent SEO efforts will get overlooked and if that happens a number of times then it will negatively affect your campaign.

3. Robots.txt

Robot.txt is a file that is stored on the web server which directly affect how search engine’s crawler interact with your website files. Ensure that your web-hosting server allow all robots, otherwise your website will not be able to rank at all.

4. Server Speed

Having a reliable server is crucial if you want your website up and running smoothly. There is also the speed factor, having a slow loading web page will put off not only crawlers also more importantly your visitors. You have to make sure that your web hosting plan provides plenty of server resources to keep it running even after you upload heaps of new content or after thousands of unique visitors landed on your website.

Here are some other tricks you might find handy to lessen the load time of your web page:

• Clean up your code – removing unimportant lines & combining scripts can go a long way.
• Performs routine broken link thorough check up and cleans up old web files will help.
• Also, put the script tag towards the end of your website code so the other small elements can be loaded first which will help your website’s loading time appears shorter – This one should be done to gain a little favor from visitors.

So, ensure you ask questions before you make decision on which company to go with. Those extra questions can be beneficial for the long run of your Online Marketing Campaign. Once you have decided, it is also recommended to have a back up web hosting plan if your financial situation permits.

Webfirm is a Melbourne-based specialist SEO and Web Development company – talk to us today about your SEO or hosting needs – phone us on (03) 4014 9036 or email us at info@webfirm.com.

Image credit Tim Dorr on Flickr