SEO Hosting: How Does Your Web Host Affect Your SEO Efforts?
The reality is, your web hosting provider affects your SEO efforts in several ways.
An excellent hosting provider will help you achieve your goals much quicker. In the same way, a bad hosting provider will hinder your SEO efforts.
So, unless you’ve started your online business in a website builder platform, then the web host that you choose could make or break your site and its search engine ranking.
Before we jump right in, let us explain first what SEO web hosting means.
What is SEO Web Hosting?
SEO web hosting does not have a formal definition. That’s because it is more of a term that people use when describing an SEO-friendly web hosting provider.
Meaning, an SEO web hosting provider is a type of provider that only adheres to practices that can positively impact your SEO efforts.
Page Load Time
There are several ways how you can optimize your website’s content for quick delivery. Things like code minification, image compression, and caching that are finely-tuned can do wonders for your site’s pages at reasonable speeds.
If search engines see that it takes too long for the site to load, then your search rankings can suffer. In fact, since 2012, Google has been using page speed as a ranking factor. That’s because a slow loading site is too inconvenient for users.
So after you are done with basic page optimizations, keep testing your page load time regularly. To check for your site speed, you can use the following tools:
Server Uptime/Downtime
If the web host that you choose in unreliable, then it can negatively impact your site’s productivity. After all, search engine bots would crawl and index a website day-in and day-out.
Meaning, the spiders that are crawling your site are keeping track if they are unable to reach it. If your site is offline all the time, then it will be deemed unreliable.
That’s why you should pick a host that has a great track record when it comes to site reliability and uptime. For example, you prefer to host your website on SiteGround. What you can do is type in “SiteGround review” for some pros and cons.
Website Location
The internet is everywhere. And it might be counterintuitive to think that the physical location of your web host can directly impact your SEO efforts, but it will.
Search engines do prioritize sites based on the region to be able to localize the results. Meaning, the closer your host is to your physical business, the more you will appear to users in your area that are trying to find you.
For a lot of web owners, while it seems quite impossible to look for a host nearby, you have to get as close as possible. Most hosts do have data center locations that you can select from, you have to choose the closest one that is available.
Website Security
A host with ineffective security can affect your SEO efforts, as well. The last thing search engines want to happen is to have their sites be infected by malware.
Designing your website properly can help secure it, but it is only half of the battle. The web host that you choose should also give you the right infrastructure to guarantee the usability and security of your site.
A reputable web host should also provide you with the right set of tools and constant guidance to help you secure your site from emerging threats online.
Shared Hosting
Initially, you might think that shared hosting is cost-effective, but remember that cheap things do not do you any good.
A shared web host means it has several websites in its server. Thus, you are also compromising the quality and reliability of your website. So, this can potentially have a negative effect on your SEO efforts.
Also, one of the biggest drawbacks of shared hosting is spamming. Having this kind of inappropriate neighbourhood significantly affects your website’s authority and ranking. Apart from that, shared hosting does not provide you with scalability, reliability, and speed.
The biggest con of shared hosting is also the lack of security, which may lead to data theft or your site could end up being compromised.
Backups
Disaster is inevitable. There is a possibility that you will lose all your site’s data.
Think about it: Lost rankings. Loss of data.
This could easily kill your business.
To protect your website from these unfortunate circumstances, it is essential to have a website backup. Doing so will make it easy for you to restore the backup that is saved by your host company. It will just be a minor hiccup on your part.
Over to You
Now that you are aware of the factors involved in picking an SEO-friendly web host, it is time to go out there and do your research. You can talk to prospective web hosts and see how they address various SEO concerns.
