Does web hosting, believe it or not, impacts SEO? If yes, then what are the things that you need to know about it? For the most part, your web hosting service provider or merely the organization that’s hosting your site significantly affects or impacts your Search Engine Optimization in many ways.
An excellent web hosting service provider can aid you in achieving your SEO desires and goals much faster. On the other hand, a low-quality web hosting service provider can put a limit to your SEO efforts.
Unfortunately, web hosting is, more often than not, an overlooked, but crucial, factor in assessing your site’s SEO rankings. To help you out, we’ll walk you through the term SEO web hosting, how it can affect your SEO efforts, and why it’s crucial to have quality web hosting for SEO.
What Does SEO Web Hosting Mean?
Since SEO web hosting is not a product or procedure, it still doesn’t have an established definition. To put it simply, it’s a term that most people use to describe an SEO-friendly web hosting service provider.
In reality, however, a web hosting service provider that’s SEO-friendly doesn’t offer anything unique or grand that can improve your SEO efforts. But it doesn’t do anything terrible that can hurt or jeopardize your SEO. To put it even simpler, it is a provider that doesn’t deal with practices that could adversely affect your SEO efforts.
How Could Your Hosting Provider Affect Your SEO?
In case you didn’t know, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a list of rules for which you can apply and employ to your site so that search engines could easily see it. It gives more visibility and exposure to your website.
And among those policies are, for the most part, affected and related by your web hosting provider such as uptime, speed, SEO awareness, and security.
Website Performance
The speed or performance of a website is, more often than not, known as a crucial SEO factor and one of the aspects that profoundly affects on-page SEO. With that in mind, your site should load fast to leverage or enjoy many SEO benefits and most especially give your audience a better user experience which could lead to more conversions.
But for you to make your website to load as fast as possible, you will need two things. That is an excellent web hosting provider with sufficient resources, fast hardware, a fantastic data center structure, and an excellently coded site with optimized images and code.
Secondly, it may not be something that you can deal naturally, but if your first option doesn’t have good, fast hardware, then you might need to look for a more dedicated or trusted provider and migrate.
Website Uptime
Moving on, website availability is another factor that impacts your SEO rankings. Search engines, such as Google, do not like to give their users sites that aren’t available. That is why search engines check, validate, and remove (temporarily or for the long-haul) from the websites they’ve indexed that have uptime issues.
The availability of a site is, for the most part, the duty and liability of your web hosting provider. If they fail to do so, it could adversely damage and hurt your online presence. And worst is that you won’t know it’s already happening, and if you got no site monitoring tools employed, you could lose your existing and potential customers.
SEO Awareness
When your web hosting service provider hardly knows what Search Engine Optimization is, and do not understand the fundamental aspects, they often do things that can potentially hurt your SEO efforts because they don’t know what they’re doing.
For instance, there are cases where web hosting providers restrict the robot.txt Googlebot because they’re visiting a site too often. If you know what robot.txt is, then you perhaps know how SEO-unfriendly the web host provider was.
Another example is shutting down sites because of high traffic or getting rid of plugins because their structure couldn’t deal with the extra load.
Website Security
Sure, you can do everything in your power to ensure that your site is secure and well-protected. However, if your web hosting service provider doesn’t do the same thing, then all your efforts will go to waste.
A site that doesn’t have excellent security will easily get infected by viruses and malware. And if you can’t resolve this issue as fast as possible, it could result in domain blacklisting and de-indexing.
How To Pick The Right SEO-friendly Hosting Provider?
Selecting an SEO-friendly hosting provider isn’t, for the most part, that hard. In fact, there are a lot of good web hosting providers available out there. Sure, the competition is tight and stiff, but that makes these hosting providers offer excellent yet affordable services, which is great for us, customers.
However, it doesn’t mean that all web hosting service providers are SEO-friendly. As such, here are a few tips on how you can choose the best, SEO-friendly web hosting provider for you and your business.
Longevity
Years in business or longevity may not be a quality factor. However, a company that’s running in the industry for years has more experience and is more capable of meeting your goals than a start-up. A business that’s operating for years must be doing something right. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the industry that long.
Reviews
What do their consumers say about their services? Are they, for the most part, satisfied with their your services? Use the web to look for reviews about your business, look at their social media pages and forums. Do they respond fast to the inquiries of their consumer?
Reputation
Reputation is one aspect of a business that we should look at. With that said, when choosing a hosting provider, know the reputation of the provider. Learn what experts and other people think about their offered services. Are the products and services offered affordable, but with an outdated design and slow homepage?
Data Center
Another critical factor to look at is the data center. Does the hosting provider have their own data center or they’re just reselling other’s services? Do they have the latest hardware and technology? Do they follow the best practices or the outdated ones?
Your Web Hosting Needs
Lastly, before you choose a web hosting service provider, you must know precisely what you need. Is Virtual Private Server good for you? Or perhaps a shared hosting plan might be the best solution? Questions like that should be, for the most part, answered first before anything else.
Why You Need Quality Web Hosting For SEO?
Most business owners and entrepreneurs alike aim more of their attention on the visual appeal of their site because they think that it’ll attract more customers. However, all your money and effort will go to waste if your website isn’t for the most part, found.
Sure, SEO is crucial for that matter, as well as the quality of your web host. Web hosting might be, more often than not, disregarded, but it’s a crucial factor in getting successful in SEO. There are a lot of reasons why your business needs great web hosting for SEO.
Let’s start with the uptime and downtime of a site. If you have got a low-quality host, then your website could experience a lot of downtimes, which can then hurt your SEO rankings. But if you have got an excellent quality host, then rest assured that your website will be more accessible. Meaning, Google can crawl it, and it can be, for the most part, found in searches.
Next is speed. We all know, and with the recent Google algorithm updates, website speed impacts SEO rankings. Although you can take control of a few factors influencing the speed of your site, still most of it highly depends on your web host.
Furthermore, the IP location of your web host can also affect your SEO rankings. With that said, look for a host with servers in your state to skyrocket your site’s SEO potential. Another reason why quality web hosting is a must for SEO is that of security.
Poor site security can, without a doubt, damage your website’s SEO. Undesirable individuals can enter your site, make spam pages, and build lots of unnatural backlinks to your website, which can lead to a Google penalty. So, before you select a web host, ensure that they have malware removal support and security technology options to protect your website from intruders.
Moreover, these days, an increasing number of sites are moving toward utilizing https to defend and secure user data in its website traffic. As such, Google said that SSL is now an SEO ranking factor. So, if you wish to move your site from HTTP to HTTPS, contact your hosting provider to get TSL/SSL certificates.
Lastly, a quality web host will ensure that you will get 24/7 technical support help. So, if your site goes down, don’t panic because your web host will surely help you.
Takeaway
Web hosting providers have a huge role to play in the success of your website. Even if there are no SEO-web hosting service providers yet, by picking a hosting company that’s trustworthy and reliable, you can, without a doubt, protect your site from security risks, downtime, slow loading speeds, etc.
Author Bio
Pauline Jacobs is a writer and a blogger. She loves to write about technical stuff such as web hosting. Pauline is keen on researching information on reputable websites such as Host Namaste. When not working, she spends some quality time with her family.
