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The Relationship Between Web Hosting and SEO Results

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Art
Art
Web Hosting Geek

Practicing effective search engine optimization (SEO) involves many factors, and just when you think you understand it all you find out that there is so much more to learn. Every aspect of your website needs to be considered when optimizing your site for targeted traffic from the search engines. This means you’ll even need to consider the kind of web hosting you use. The reliability of a web host is perhaps one of the most important aspects. If your web host is not efficient at keeping your site up and running then your SEO efforts could lose their efficacy in time.

There is simply no other way to get tons of targeted traffic on autopilot. The problem that most people have regarding search engine optimization is the sheer density of it. There is just so much to know and it seems as if there is not enough time in the day to devote to it. As soon as you think you know it all, you find out you’ve been doing something wrong all along. Search engines have been developed over time to index and catalog every aspect of your website, both internally and externally. Therefore the factors that affect your search engine ranking are innumerable. One factor that most people overlook is the relationship between their hosting company and their search engine optimization effort.

Search engine optimization is the best way to get consistent traffic to your web site without having to continuously invest money in advertising and other forms of marketing and promotion. By optimizing your web sites properly you can bring in a steady flow of traffic and forget about marketing and other annoying and repetitive aspects of online business. In fact, many webmasters spend the majority of their time trying to find more ways to increase their search engine ranking and traffic. Unfortunately, many webmasters don’t realize they’ve already hurt their chances of being as successful online by choosing the wrong web hosting plan. Contrary to popular belief, there is a solid connection between web hosting and search engine optimization.

Hosting Reliability and Features

Most people don’t realize that an unreliable hosting network can have a negative impact on a web site’s search engine ranking and site indexing. When your web site is down (as it often may be with unreliable web hosting) search engine robots will be unable to index your new pages. This may have a very negative impact on the amount of pages that are indexed for your site, and how often updated pages are indexed in the search engine results.

A powerful hosting plan will also be able to handle more software installations and tasks, which can be especially useful if you are using automated software for link building or to perform other mundane tasks involved with SEO.

Downtime and Crawlers

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If you’re in the business of search engine optimization then you know that search engines use crawlers to index the entire web, including your website. If your site is down when these crawlers visit your site, then the search engine cannot crawl the site and index it. This means any optimization efforts you recently made will go unnoticed. If this happens several times you could be greatly hindering your search engine optimization efforts without even realizing it.

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Server Speed

website speed

Having a slow loading website is another factor that could hurt your SEO efforts. This means you’ll need to use a web host that is known for having reliable and competent servers, and you’ll need to purchase a plan that gives you all of the server resources needed to keep your site running smoothly even when you’ve uploaded a plethora of content and you have hundreds of daily unique visitors. If the page takes too long to load then many visitors will become annoyed and leave the page.

The interesting aspect about Google is that it uses an algorithm to detect how long some on stays at your page before they return to the search engine results. This information is then applied to your site SEO score and it directly affects the way your site is ranked. If your visitors are leaving your site within a few seconds due to slow loading home page, then you can be assured that your site is going to experience a drop in page rank. If you want your site to get to the top of the search engines and stay there, then you will need to make sure you have a reliable hosting plan with plenty of server resources.

IP Addresses

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For the advanced SEO expert that routinely does link building through various web 2.0 properties, the most obvious aspect of a web hosting plan that has an impact on SEO is the amount of IP addresses given to each webmaster. When search engines index web pages they do so with automated crawlers that index every aspect of the page and site, including the web site’s IP address. If you own a network of web sites and you would like to build a link network using these sites, then you will need to have a separate IP address for each web site. Fortunately, IP addresses are not a major factor for webmasters that don’t own a lot of web sites that are interlinking in the same niche.

Indeed, this is another factor that plays into your search engine ranking is the IP address of your website. If you use shared hosting then you will be sharing an IP address with other websites. If one of those websites does something to get their site deindexed by the search engines, then you may suffer the same fate. Therefore you may want to consider a hosting plan that gives you your own IP address such as dedicated web hosting. If you really want to get handle on the search engines then you may even want to have access to several IP addresses. To do this you can use SEO hosting services that will lease you several IP addresses per month.

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IP Address Reputation

The final SEO factor that is directly related to your web host is your IP address. Every website online has an IP address that it is associated with. With some hosting plans you share an IP address with others, and some hosting accounts give you your own dedicated IP address. If you decide to share an IP address with others then you need to understand that you are taking a substantial risk to your search engine optimization efforts. Since you are sharing an IP address with other sites, if these sites are penalized by the search engines your site could lose some of its value within the search engine as well, especially if your site is in anyway linked to the non-reputable site on your IP address. For more information on this make sure you talk to your hosting company about dedicated IP addresses and how they can help you.

Robots.txt

Another important factor of SEO that closely relates to your web hosting account is your robots.txt file. The robots.txt is a document that tells your server how it should deal with outside influences such as website visitors and search engine crawlers. This document will differ depending on the hosting company that you’re with. Some web hosts will have the document set to allow search engine crawlers while others will not. It is extremely important to make sure your robot.txt files allows crawlers to index your site, otherwise the site will not even be indexed at all!

Usually, the robots.txt file is an overlooked connection between your web hosting plan and your SEO efforts. The robots.txt file is a file that is located on your web server, which dictates how robots (particularly search engine bots) interact with your web site. If the robot.txt file is set to dis-allow all robots then your site will not be able to get ranked by any search engine, leaving you without any form of SEO traffic. Most hosting companies leave this file blank or do not include, so it is important to verify whether or not the robots.txt file is present in the web server that hosts your web site.

SEO Considerations for Web Hosting

Choosing a web hosting solution that aids in your SEO efforts can be a challenging task. In order to make an informed decision, you need take various factors into consideration, including features, technical support and price among other vital aspects. This article will provide some golden tips that will give you the best possible change of succeeding with your SEO campaign.

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Company Background

In the web hosting industry, track record is everything. For this reason, it is important that you find out how long prospective hosts have been in the business.This is critical because new companies enter the market all the time but many of them fold within the first year.These flight-by-night hosts leave you out of your money and a website. Experience varies but you at least want to sign up with a company that has been around for a couple of years.

Services and Features

Apart from SEO tactics, you need to make yourself familiar with some of the technologies involved in the web hosting arena. For example, you need to have an idea of how much disk space and bandwidth your website will require to support files and traffic. You also might want to check out the email options for keeping in touch with your clients as well the provided tools designed to help you boost search engine rankings. Hosting providers are increasingly offering features such as keyword optimizers, web stat utilities, Google Webmaster tools, unique IP addresses and others that make it easier to optimize your website and maintain rankings.

Support Considerations

Whether SEO is involved or not, support is one of the most vital aspects of any hosting solution. This is one point that simply can’t be stressed enough as the host forms that crutch you need to even run an optimized site. The hosting provider’s support staff should be there whenever you need help whether it is a week day, week night or rare hour over the weekend. Finding this quality in a web host isn’t as easy as it sounds because support on the market ranges from outstanding to virtually non-existent. You could be doing everything right but without quality support, your SEO efforts are likely to prove futile.

Cost Factor

The last consideration on our list relates to price because let’s face it, no one ever wants to overpay for anything. You definitely want to keep your eyes on the price, especially when looking into a company that advertises their service as “SEO web hosting.” They could be doing so because a special set of search engine optimization tools are included in the package, or simply trying to bank off a fast growing niche market. If you don’t mind paying a little extra to boost your rankings, just make sure you are getting value for every dollar you invest.

Conclusion

There are several web hosts out there but few have your best interests in mind when it comes to SEO. This is why it is so vital to do your homework. Without a reliable hosting solution, you can optimize all you want and still won’t even sniff the pages of Google.

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