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Many business owners focus primarily on the appearance of their website or the quality of their content, believing that it will attract new visitors and therefore customers. But all the money spent on designing your website is not worth much if your site is not well referenced in Google or any other search engine. I hope you already know the importance of the content very well. But do you think of the background work that ensures the ranking of your website by search engines? An important starting point is the quality of your website host.
Web Hosting is a factor all too often overlooked by a lot of web marketers, and it’s clear in 2019 that this is essential if you want to appear on Google’s number 1 page for your main keywords.
Following factors you should consider before selecting the right host for your site:
Server Uptime / Downtime:
The quality of your web host is a determining factor in the accessibility of your website. If a host of your site fails often then there are more chances that your site will fail, which can affect your SEO rankings. And yes, if Google robots cannot access your site, visitors either and Google will not priorities your website. On the other hand, if your website is accessible virtually all the time – especially when Google is crawling – it is more likely to be ranked in relevant searches. Downtime of your site can reduce your traffic quite frequently. Make sure you monitor the uptime of your site and contact your host if you have any concerns. Remember to analyze your logs from time to time!
Hosting Support
When your website goes down, the time suddenly stops and panic sets in. These moments will reveal the true character of your host. Make sure your host provides 24/7 technical support. If you want to go one step further, find out about the experience of the customer support staff at your hosting company. This way, in case of disaster, you will know that you have a dedicated and competent support team ready to fly to your rescue.
Location of Your Server:
The physical location of your WebHost and server had an impact on your SEO ranking in the past. Search engines could rank websites with IP addresses in the same country as the IP used to search, higher than those based in other countries.
Search engines have evolved since then and although this is no longer important and will not prevent you from ranking number 1 on Google, it plays an important role in the speed of loading your data and therefore your site.
The location of your server can affect the speed of your website. If you are targeting users in a different country than your host server, these users may experience slower loading times, which can negatively impact the success of your website. That’s why many multi-market sites now use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver their data faster. So try to find a host with servers in your country or relatively close to your location to increase the SEO potential of your website.
Also read, How to find the best web hosting plan for your business
Server Speed
The loading speed of the pages of your website affects the SEO ranking. The Internet is a highly competitive world, and its users are no longer willing to wait to see the content of a site takes more than 3 minutes to load, especially on mobile. You can control some of the factors that affect the speed of your sites, such as code and content, but that largely depends on your internet hosting solution. Just like downtime, speed fluctuates, so check your website’s loading times often with tools like Pingdom or GtMetrix to see if there are any significant or disturbing changes. Some technical factors over which you have control include the type of hard drive used, the availability of a content delivery network (CDN), the use of a caching plugin, and whether the hosting is optimized for your system, content management system like WordPress or Wix.
If you’re sure you’ve done everything right on your side, but your website’s loading times are still slow, do not let your web host down! Try to contact your web developer and web host and ask if they can help you or if there are VPS options or dedicated server updates available to improve the performance of your website.
Server Security
Poor security can be very detrimental to the SEO of your site specially in case of shared hosting. Attackers can hack into your site, create spam pages to link to more often, and generate massive amounts of fake backlinks to your site to boost the page – the kind of things Google likes to penalize. When you have successfully identified the fraudulent page and had it deleted, Google will probably have already imposed the penalty and the damage will have been caused. Poor security also increases the chances that your website will be infected with malware, which can lead to your site being blacklisted by search engines or displaying a security warning on websites.
Before choosing a web host, make sure you have adequate security measures and malware prevention and removal system to defend your site against escalating attacks.
HTTPS / SSL support
More and more sites are moving towards the use of https to protect the data of their users. For this reason, Google said in 2017 that the use of an SSL certificate is now a positive factor of SEO ranking. It’s still a minor grading factor at the moment, so it should not have too much impact, but it looks like it will become more and more important in the near future, especially in an industry looking to protect more in addition to user data (see GDPR recently).
If you want to move your website from HTTP to HTTPS, check with your host for their specific TSL / SSL certificates. Many web hosts offer free Let’s Encrypt SSL or Comodo certificates. Of course, if you have an e-commerce site, get some advice for a more robust certificate!
From there, you’ll want to check with your WebHost to find out what you need to do to make sure your website is fully running on HTTPS. If this sounds intimidating, rest assured – these lists are quite easy to find on the web and will help you make the change seamlessly. Be careful here to make your URL redirections and also attention to mixed content!
Summary:
Behind your Website’s SEO ranking, Hosting service is mainly responsible. Even if there is no SEO web hosting companies for that reason, select a hosting service provider that is trustworthy, responsible, secure, with guaranteed uptime which will protect your website from all threats. Also, it will enhance the SEO of your website in terms of speed, Uptime, Storage, and security.
