You, like many, may think that your journey into web prominence begins with analytics, selective keywords and the smart utilisation of these nifty keywords. Whilst all these aspects are highly crucial in building your SEO presence, did you know that the very foundation of you website’s SEO actually starts with your hosting company and which of their plans you pick?
Whilst Google is not going to shoot your rankings to the top based on a good host, a bad host can indeed damage your chances at building your website’s credit with search engines. Have a look at our 3 main factors on how and why hosting affects your website’s SEO!
Search Engines Love Speed
It is a known fact that quick and responsive websites are favoured by Google and other search engines – fast websites are far more likely to climb up the SEO ladder than sluggish websites. Long load times on a website are a surefire way to turn people off and negatively affect their user experience.
Ensuring that you are using a reputable hosting service from companies that are renowned for their speed will ensure that your website loads as fast as it possibly can. Cheaper hosting options often offer shared servers, and although a shared server is in no way a bad thing, if your website garners a high volume of traffic and maintenance, it is advised to fork out a little extra for a personal server.
[tweetthis]How does #hosting affect the #speed of your website? [/tweetthis]
Accessibility
Your website can be running at lightning speed, but all this doesn’t matter if your site is down or has crashed temporarily. Say goodbye to an entire day’s worth of traffic should this happen! Websites that are consistently down tend to be penalised in the spectrum of SEO if it is not looked into and fixed as soon as possible. This is why it is crucial that you use a prominent and reliable hosting service that has well maintained servers and round the clock tech support. No website is perfect, and there are definitely going to be periods of time where your site indeed down, so having a reliable hosting company that is able to fix your issues at any time of the day is absolutely essential.
[tweetthis]It doesn’t matter if your #website is running at lightning #speed if it is down! [/tweetthis]
Location Location Location!
Search engines assess the location of websites when deciding where to place it in search rankings. If you are based in Australia and are making a search, search engines will normally display Australian based websites higher up in your search results.
Search engines determine your location based upon a number of indicators, one of which is your website’s IP address. That same IP address is assigned to your website based off the location of the server that it is being hosted on. So, if your business is based in Australia and your target market is the Australian population, hosting your website with a company that has servers in Australia should result in higher search rankings for your website when Australians search for your targeted keywords.
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Keeping these pointers in mind, we hope that we have helped you in making your decision on what hosting service to use to further strengthen your website’s SEO game.
