WEBSITE DESIGN
DIGITAL MARKETING
SEO
When we start in the marketing world, we make a list of things to pay attention to. We worry about backlinks, about the quality of our content, about sitemaps, but how often do we pay attention to friendly SEO web hosting?
The competition for the first place in Google’s first page is fierce! And the best competitors work their SEO really hard, so an alternative for your site to stand out from the crowd is choosing the right SEO hosting companies.
But what exactly should you be looking for on that SEO company? Design Point, the SEO Melbourne Company, unveils the 5 top qualities a friendly SEO web hosting must have to launch your site to space!
What is a web hosting?
Let’s start from the beginning; a web hosting is an online service that allows you or your company to launch a website to the internet.
There are different types of web hosting available, they respond to the purposes of your webpage and the necessities of your company; they go from the typical service for beginners to shared servers or private ones.
To put it simple; a web host is like a wardrobe and your site is a specific outfit. When someone wants that specific outfit, all they have to do is open the closet (internet), search among the other clothes (writing your website address or typing specific keywords), and there it is! The computer reaches the server where your site is located.
A web hosting often gets confused with a DNS (Domain Name Server), they are not the same but they are related.
Humans remember words easily than numbers, that’s why choosing the right URL for your business is so important. A DNS works like a phonebook directory, when you are looking for a particular service, you search the name (DNS, and then you get the address/phone number (URL).
Finding that URL means the words you just typed convert into numbers, an IP address the computer understands, and then you get redirected to the website you wanted.
What is SEO web hosting?
First, we need to clarify that SEO web hosting is not a method or a procedure a web hosting follows to improve your SEO, all it does is not interfere with it.
If you hire a regular web hosting service, chances are it only provides you with a spot to locate your site and doesn’t take in count the SEO tricks your site can take advantage of, like loading speed, reviews and user’s experience box, etc.
So if you have done everything to improve your SEO and still think you are not getting the wanted results, it may be time to change your dull web hosting service for a friendly SEO web hosting, something we at Design Point know a lot about.
Web hosting factors that affect your SEO
Consider your own experience as an internet user; whatever you look for online, you want to get it fast, and you want it as clear as water.
So if you click the first result you find on Google and the page takes forever to load, or if the content is not well distributed, what do you do? You simply close it and check the next one, after all, you have infinite options to choose from.
A slow web host scares visitors away, a site that constantly crashes or that have a poor quality will damage your SEO rankings for sure.
Something not many people know is the importance of the location of your server. The closer your server is to the location of your IP address, the faster it will work and the higher it will rank.
This is something quite related to the speed issue, if you get a server from Indonesia and you live in Spain, Spanish users may have a harsh time loading content, meaning, they will close your site and never click it again.
To fully understand better how a web hosting can affect your SEO strategy, let’s go to the point of this article and talk about the 5 most important things to look for when searching for a SEO friendly web hosting.
1. Security
Make sure your web hosting company takes security very seriously, an insecure website not only will cause you trouble with hackers, but it will make users feel dubious about leaving their information for newsletters and even shopping.
Imagine having a poorly secure site that can be hacked in no time, and then it transforms into a spam page, generating a huge amount of fake backlinks to your page.
This is the sort of thing Google loves to penalize, and not only you get lower rankings, but your clients will feel insecure and probably never go back to you again. So it’s not just about getting a professional SEO company, it’s also about a secure web hosting.
2. Uptime/downtime
Uptime and downtime are terms related to the amount of time your website is available for readers.
When your site is downtime, for whatever reasons, it will still show on the results page. But this can change if users or search engine auditors click it and notice that it’s more down than up; they will mark it as inaccessible, after a few weeks it will be unreliable, and your rankings will dramatically drop.
This aspect is closely related to the website’s availability. Google doesn’t like to redirect users to sites that are not up most of the time, so having high rates of downtime can damage your reputation so bad, you can eventually disappear from their rank.
It will be inevitable to get some downtime now and then, but it’s up to you choosing a web hosting that provides its service’s uptime 99.9% of the time.
3. Speed
Like we said before, speed plays a role in this SEO web hosting game. If you are 100% sure your site is fully optimized to load content fast, but still notice an annoying slow down, you must check with your web hosting service.
It’s quite common that hosting services share the server’s resources with hundreds of other sites like yours, the more sites they store in a server, the slower they will load.
Sure, you can get your own private server to scape this problem, but they are really expensive, so your best move is to simply move your site to a different server with better resources and shorter loading times.
4. Location
Speed and location go hand in hand for two reasons. Search engines like to take a look to the location of a website when it’s time to rank it; for example: if a user is doing a search from Australia, the search engines will prefer showing him in the first places results from Australia.
Basically, hosting your site on an Australian server influences your ranking for Australian sites. On the other hand, if your site is hosted in an Australian server but it’s focused on American people, you should consider choosing a server closer to the United States.
Is this a rule you should follow to the letter? It’s not strictly mandatory, but it is highly recommended.
5. Tech support to the day
You know what’s annoying? Waking up at 3am for a glass of water, checking your site from your smartphone just because, and noticing it’s down but there is no one from your web hosting service around to put it back up.
Accidents and web errors happen all the time, sometimes your host will notice it first and let you know they are fixing it, but some other times they may notice it and not tell you anything because they are working on other sites.
So if you notice something weird going on with your page, contact them! Maybe they are already working on it, or just haven’t noticed it yet.
SEO web hosting is a 24/7 job, and the company you choose must provide tech support all day, all night, and even holidays. The internet does not take free days, so neither should your site.
From Design Point, the best SEO Melbourne Company, we can number other aspects you should consider before hiring a SEO web hosting service.
Many hosting companies look alike, they offer the best services on the market and prices according to your budget, but which should you choose?
First notice the costumer’s reviews, if they don’t have a page on their site dedicated to this, just Google them. Often you will find reviews and commentaries about their services that can help you decide whether hiring them for a year or move on to the next option.
Experience is also an important aspect when looking for a SEO friendly hosting; beware of fake offers promising the best SEO web hosting, remember it’s not something they create, but something they facilitate with the 5 points we mentioned before.
Young companies deserve a chance but it is inevitable to mistrust a little, hence, if you stumble upon a company with almost no time on the job, request a meeting with one of their techs to fully decide if this is the service you want or not.
Finally, we all like extra cheese and bacon with our burgers, right? Those are the little extras that make a good meal even better, the same thing happens with web hosting services, the more they have to offer besides the obvious, the more interesting it gets.
Some SEO friendly extras a web hosting company can offer you are:
- SSL: Secure Sockets Layer is a security standard technology that establishes a secure encrypted link between the web’s server and a browser, it basically protects any sensitive data that goes through any of those points. Some web hosting services offer SSL for a little extra price or if you get a long-term contract, they include it.
- Automatic backups: just like a Word document, your site’s information needs to be saved periodically. Some web hosting companies offer automatic backups for free or at an affordable cost. Consider to take that option, you never know when it will go wrong.
- Multiple hosting plans: your site needs will change with time, therefore, your hosting needs will change too. A company that offers multiple hosting plans can migrate your site from one server to a bigger one when needed, that means you can attract a bigger traffic without crashing the site, not to mention that this type of site migration results cheaper if you handle it with the same hosting provider than with a new one.
We hope all your doubts about SEO friendly hosting had vanished after reading our article; don’t forget to check our blog regularly to keep up to date with the latest in design, development, digital marketing, graphic design, and SEO news!