After you have chosen the best web hosting plan and hired one of the most skilled website builders, search engine optimization is essential to keep your site at the top and ranking high. To keep your website’s visitors coming back to you in the modern age, web hosting for SEO is essential.
SEO is the art of optimizing your website and content so that it ranks as high as possible on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engine results. The ideal scenario is for someone to search for keywords relevant to your business and your website to be the first link that appears on search engines.
Your web hosting provider plays an important role in determining the search engine optimization score of your own website. We outline seven important web hosting factors that will impact the quality of your website’s organic traffic.
Important Factors in Choosing the Best Web Hosting for SEO
Slow Website Speed
Load time is an important factor to consider when testing web hosting providers. A website that takes a long time to load is a sign of a slow web hosting provider. Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam Team highlighted the impact of page load times on website performance.
Nobody likes waiting for a website to load. Waiting is something that people hate so much on the internet; major search engines such as Google even factor your site’s speed into their SEO scores. Sites that take longer than 30 seconds to load are penalized. Websites that load quickly are promoted in search engine results pages.
It is well-known that visitors will switch to another website if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load a website. Website page loading time is an important factor in determining its reputation.
A website that takes a long time to load will have a high bounce rate, which directly affects its search engine rankings. A website with a low SEO score will result in a lower conversion rate.
Web hosts that are reliable can reduce a website’s loading time using the latest caching technology. This results in a high volume of traffic. A faster website load means more visitors.
It is important to choose a hosting provider that offers fast service for your site. Consider upgrading to the best VPS hosting (virtual private server) or to the best cloud hosting provider if you have the budget. Shared hosting services are slower. This is especially important if your site receives more than a few thousand visits each month.
These are some of the most effective online tools for measuring page load time:
- Google Page Experience Checker by Cloudways
- Google Page Speed Tool
- Pingdom
- GT Metrix
Make sure your host’s data center is close to your audience. Your website will take longer to load if there is more data to be sent back and forth. It is worth considering page caching and enlisting the assistance of a content delivery system (CDN).
Be sure to review your website content before you blame your web hosting provider for slow loading. Poorly designed plugins and large images can all slow down your website and impact your SEO score.
Website Downtime
This is the most important test for web hosting providers. It is a sign that your web hosting provider is not reliable if you have frequent web server downtime.
A slow site is worse than one that doesn’t load at all. Problems at your web host almost always cause downtime. It could be a hardware failure, overloaded servers, security breaches, or anything else.
Website downtime can not only impact the website’s performance but also affects its SERP and SEO. Let’s look at it from a practical perspective.
Websites that experience downtime do not show up in search engines. What happens when the search engine queries for a website with similar content? The glitch will result in search engines not finding the website and a decrease in SEO. Additionally, it increases the bounce rates of that website which can directly impact a website’s authority.
Even if your website is offline for a few minutes, it can cause your website’s SEO performance to drop. Google and other search engines may flag your website as unreliable. Google can de-list your website from search results if the downtime is prolonged for more than a few minutes.
Choosing the best web hosting provider available for your website will ensure that your website is always up and running.
When choosing a web hosting provider, make sure to check if they offer an uptime guarantee. Also, how reliable it is. Your site may still go down for several days per year, but a 99.99% uptime guarantee will ensure that your site is down only for a few minutes every year.
Accessing Shared Hosting Servers with Spammers
Although shared hosting might seem affordable, it is not the best option. Because you don’t compromise on quality, a shared host allows you to host multiple websites on one shared server.
Google does not prefer websites hosted on shared servers. This is against SEO ethics. Spamming is another disadvantage to shared hosting. These hosting provider companies are cheap and can be used by anyone, even spammers.
The inappropriate neighborhood directly impacts website authority and ranking. Shared hosting is not able to provide speed, reliability, and scalability.
Shared hosting has a major drawback—it lacks security, which could lead to data theft or compromise of your website.
While this is not an issue that is common, spammy websites and email addresses could share your server and cause your website to be ranked lower in search engines. Many search engines penalize spammy sites by penalizing all websites using the IP address. This could also include your website if you are using shared hosting plans.
This is a simple way to find out if your SEO performance has been affected by poor site design. To see if anyone else is using your IP address, enter your URL into the ReverseIP Domain Check tool.
Database Connection Failure
You and your visitors may be seeing warning messages that say “Internal Server Problem” or “Database Connection Failed.” This is because your server is overwhelmed with traffic. Although it won’t impact your SEO score as severely as a site that’s offline, it could cause your site to bounce much higher.
A cached copy of your site, or pages popular to you, can be created so that your visitors don’t have to connect to your database. WP Super Cache, a free plugin for WordPress is the best way to do this.
You should upgrade hosting providers for the long term. A lack of bandwidth is the reason for database errors. Ask your SEO friendly hosting provider about scaling up to VPS and Cloud Hosting plans.
Incorrect TLD
If possible, ensure your website URL uses the.com Top-Level Domain (TLD). This is the domain that people will assume you are using when they search for your website. Your website address should end in .net or .co. This is a Colombian TLD and not an alternative to.com. Visitors will have difficulty finding your site if they end in .net or .co.
Unfortunately, most of the top.com domain names are already taken. This means there is a compromise. No matter what you do, ensure that your website name is memorable and your TLD isn’t too obscure if it isn’t possible to acquire a .com domain.
Set Up Geo-Targeting
Google Search Console Tool has geo-targeting as an outstanding feature. This tool allows you to target the right audience worldwide, regardless of where your server is located.
Targeting the right audience is not necessary if your website has a local domain like .au, .co or .uk. It will likely grab it automatically. If your domain is international, such as (.com), it’s important to specify the country that you are targeting in the search console.
Google will use your IP address to track the country of the website. This can be a problem later. A global domain can be targeted by a search console.
Target Local Audience with a Local Host
Your website visitors will have a faster browsing experience if their server location is close to them. Servers located close to the target audience will result in quicker redirection to your website. It is therefore important for website owners to understand how the location of hosting providers affects SEO.
Ecommerce stores that target local customers are more likely to be successful in the local market. A website located in Australia hosted on a local host will fetch better SEO rankings as well as relevant traffic than a server located outside of Australia.
It is easy to understand why every website has an IP address that directly links to its geographical location. It will be easier to target local audiences and will ultimately improve your website’s local search engine rankings.
Google, for instance, prefers to link Australian users with Australian websites. This is why you should use a local host to host your website.
The IP address of a server or its location plays a part in the placement of your website on Google search results. Native server location also means relevant website traffic.
Web page loading times are affected by server location. The server will download data faster if it is close to the audience than a remote server.
Conclusion
After you have chosen the best web hosting provider and hired one of the most skilled website builders, search engine optimization is essential to keep your site at the top and ranking high. To keep your website’s visitors coming back to you in the modern age, SEO is essential.
SEO is the art of optimizing your website and content so that it ranks as high as possible on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search results. The ideal scenario is for someone to search for keywords relevant to your business and your website to be the first link that appears onscreen.
Your web hosting provider plays an important role in SEO, and SEO hosting management can be a daunting task. Your site’s SEO score is largely determined by the content you provide. However, it’s important for search engines to be aware of any web host factors that may have an impact on how your site ranks in searches. These potential SEO hosting issues associated with search engines can be eliminated by making sure you choose the best web hosting provider.