Nowadays, the web presence is one of the key elements of the promotion of any business. But it’s often not enough to just have a website that is done well; it is important to promote your site in all possible ways so that it is easily found via search engines. This is called search engine optimization, or shortly SEO, and it encompasses a wide range of actions that site owners and their teams undertake to improve the website’s visibility in search results. Quality web hosting is the first of the key elements, a fundamental parameter from which it’s best to start optimizing your website. Why? Because the goal of search engines is to offer users the best results to be found on the internet. These results must be hence useful, usable, and secure. The performance of the site is thus an important component of how search engines rank your site, and the hosting of your site is one of the first things to be responsible for it.
Why is hosting so fundamental?
Your website is, that is to say, a virtual entity. At least it seems such when you are browsing the internet. It is essentially hundreds and hundreds of lines of code that work in some mysterious way. But they work not in the Ether – they operate on physical pieces of hardware, which are known as servers, and these are what you rent from a hosting provider. The quality of the hosting provider’s services is the first thing to affect the quality of your website’s operation, and this way, you have to choose a hosting provider carefully. Otherwise, neither you, your customers, nor the search engines will be pleased with your website, even if it’s otherwise created perfectly.
What is exactly affected by hosting?
The performance of your site consists of a few elements, each of which has a certain impact on how the site is ranked. Let’s see!
Speed
The speed at which a website loads is the first thing that users encounter whenever they come in contact with your website. If the users are to wait for a noticeable interval of time for every page of your website they are willing to access, they can end up being frustrated and give up browsing your website, preferring to look for one of your competitors. With that in mind, search bots tend to filter the websites they rank according to this factor. If your site loads slowlier than 3 seconds, it will fall down in rankings. This takes particular place if we have to deal with e-commerce. But this problem won’t touch you if you rent a good hosting solution – a VPS or a dedicated server – from a good hosting provider. The same applies to all points that will be discussed in the following.
Uptime
Uptime is another critical point. Your website must not only load well, but it must be present at all. If it’s not the case, and the user does not find your website where it is supposed to be, chances are it will be considered broken and abandoned in favor of something else. For this reason, uptime is another aspect that is taken into account by search engines whenever they rank websites. To ensure everything will be alright here, you must look for a provider offering the maximum uptime – not 99 percent, but all 99,99 percent. The latter will mean just 15 minutes of downtime a month, while the former – about 7 hours, which is already a big deal.
Location
This is the next point that is affected by the hosting and has an impact on the SEO.
The latency, when interacting with a website, depends also on the remoteness of the server hosting the website from the audience. Also, the IP of your host matters for SEO, and the local IPs have a certain priority for the local audience than the foreign ones. Thus, the logical strategy is to choose a server that is close enough to the target audience. So, looking for a hosting provider that can offer you a wide range of locations is a good idea. An example of one is Hostzealot. They offer diverse locations worldwide, so you’ll always be able to host your website as close to your target audience as possible.
Some final words
Hosting is fundamental for your site to work well, and that’s why search engines pay a lot of attention to it. Of course, the SEO does not end here, and there are many more things to keep an eye on – like filling the site with the right content, monitoring search trends, keywords, link building… But if you, albeit engaging in all these activities, do not notice considerable progress in SEO promotions, perhaps you should check whether the host – the foundation of your website – is set up well.
Learn more:
https://www.techradar.com/news/how-web-hosting-affects-seo
https://searchengineland.com/web-hosting-seo-important-386714