Organizations are eager to see their websites on top of Google search page as online marketplace is ever-growing. If a website doesn’t rank on the first page of Google, it is expected to not get noticed at all – Modern world is all about SEO.
More likely to grab better Google search rankings are websites that operate smooth and swift and this is only possible when you host a website on a top-notch hosting server or buy shared Linux hosting which is trusted. Whether a web host affects SEO of a website is a common question, and the answer is a big YES, apparently!
It is imperative to understand why it is important to choose a reliable host for your website and how a poor web host affects a website’s SEO.
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What is a web host anyway?
To keep it simple, web hosting or a web hosting service provider is what allows internet users to view your website. Your website cannot and will not run on its own without a server hosting. Making it available for everyone, these businesses will have the appropriate technologies to support your websites’ information. It isn’t a one-time pass through. Depending on the duration of your subscription, you need to regularly update or renew hosting services.
How important is web hosting in SEO?
In a word – very. SEO is immediately associated with content production, mobile optimization, and web design and development.
How the hosting provider affects the SEO?
To make your website have more exposure and visibility to search engines, search engine optimization is a set of rules you can apply to your website. Performance (speed), availability (uptime), security and SEO awareness – are those rules which are related and affected by your hosting provider.
Web site speed:
One of the items affecting on page SEO is the speed of a website. In order to take advantage of SEO benefits and offering your users a better experience which leads to more conversions, your website should load as fast as possible.
It will also affect the performance of your website if the provider does not have good hardware. Then your only option is to migrate or buy shared Linux hostingwhich is trustworthy.
Web site availability:
Website availability is another factor that affects your search engine rankings. Google and other search engines check can remove websites from their index websites that have availability issues as they don’t like to redirect their users to websites that are not available.
It is the responsibility of web hosting providers to make your website available and failure to do so can damage your online reputation when you buy shared Linux hosting. You are losing customers and traffic if you don’t have any website monitoring tools in place. This is happening while you are sleeping and there is nothing worse than that.
Security:
It’s like building sand castles if the hosting provider does not provide security measures. For those of you who had the experience of a hacked website then you know what we are talking about and how frustrating it is to see your business hacked.
It’s important to note that – a website that does not have good security is most probably infected by malware. It results in de-indexing and domain blacklisting if this is not resolved fast.
SEO Awareness:
Your hosting provider may sometimes do things that can damage your efforts without knowing what they are doing if they do not know what SEO is and don’t understand the basic principles. There have been cases where hosting providers restricted the Google bot in the robots.txt because they were making many visits to a website! People who know what robots.txt is can understand how SEO unfriendly the provider was.
Providers have also been seen shutting down websites because they had a lot of traffic and or asking webmasters to remove plugins because their infrastructure could not handle the extra load.
All in all, your hosting provider should not do anything that could damage your SEO or reputation when you buy shared Linux hosting. Their inefficiencies should not hamper your business and more importantly they should not do this without your permission.
How to Choose an SEO Friendly Host
An SEO-friendly host will look different depending on the kind of site you run and how much traffic you receive. For every style of website – there is no perfect hosting choice. A solid shared host will be enough to support your site if you have a small site that doesn’t receive a lot of traffic when you buy sharedLinux hosting.
However, using a shared host will probably have a negative impact on your site’s performance and rankings, if you receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. The best course of action here would be upgrading to a VPS, cloud, or dedicated host.
Evaluate your hosting choices with the factors below:
- Does the host have a high benchmark of performance? Spend some time checking out user reviews online if you are unsure.
- Does your host include an automated backup system or use a third-party plug-in?
- Do you have the ability to install or purchase an SSL certificate for your site?
- Does your host guarantee a high site uptime? This actually means – Is there data, or a guarantee to back up the data?
- Can you choose your datacenter location? Or, does you hosting include an integrated or third-party CDN?
Going through the above questions will help you buy shared Linux hosting which is high-performing and will actually support your rankings, not bury your site in the search results. Always remember, your host can have a big impact on your SEO at all times. Your hosting environment could be the culprit if your site hasn’t been ranking as high as you think it should.