5 Ways How SEO And Web Hosting Go Hand In Hand

When you hire an SEO agency, they usually optimize the content of your site, but there’s another factor that can cause the search engines’ view of your site to change, and that is your web hosting. Here are the top 5 ways how SEO and web hosting influence each other:

 

1. Uptime

This is an obvious issue and one that really needs to be considered. If your website is down when a search engine is attempting to look at its content, that could be a loss of ranking, so a host with high uptime (greater than 95%) is necessary. But it doesn’t stop there: you need even higher uptime if you want to build a site with a lot of social interaction.

Search engines rank your site higher if it generates unique content fast, for example by using a forum, or allowing users to reply to posts. Every moment your website is down, it would mean no content is being produced, and so SEO potential is lost. This is why a host with good uptime is essential.

 

2. Shared Hosting

With most hosting packages, your site will be sharing an IP address with many others. Normally, this will not affect you greatly, but if a large number of spammers and very badly ranked sites share the same IP address as yours, the search engines may become suspicious of that address, and so your site may be badly ranked, even if you did nothing to cause it.

Dedicated hosting is the only way to make sure this won’t happen, but if you chose a good host and purchase normal hosting, these problems should not arise.

 

3. Speed

This factor is a very simple one to understand: the faster your host’s speed is, the higher your site will be ranked. Of course, this isn’t a huge effect, but it certainly is there, and it might just stop you from achieving your SEO goals for your site, so you need to take it into account.

Your speed can also be affected by who you share your IP with, and how much traffic they are receiving.

 

4. Hosting Location

Where your website is physically hosted is another piece of information that search engines gather. If you use a generic domain such as .com or .org (these are technically US domains, however, they are often used for other sites) then search engines may assume that your hosting location is the target country of your site.

This can affect SEO in a variety of ways, ranging from what ads are displayed on your site, to what search engines it ranks highly on. This effect is not a huge one, but it should be taken into consideration.

 

5. The Control Panel

The more control you have over your website, the better, and the control panel that your web host gives you can affect this vastly. Make sure your host gives you access to the FTP, and the MySql databases (personally we recommend cPanel).

If this is not available, you can’t install scripts, and you might not be able to edit the files on your site directly, instead, you may have to use a site builder, which can limit your access to certain parts of your site and means you can’t optimize or even edit certain parts.

SEO and web hosting indirectly go hand in hand and deficiency in any of it can impact the performance of your site in the long run to a considerable extent. Make sure to review your web hosting with the above-mentioned points in mind before making any future decisions.