21 December, 2012

SEO and Web Hosting: How Are They Related


If your web host is a poor one then it is possible that it will affect the SEO value of your website. If your website is due to draw a lot of traffic then a poor host may also limit the SEO potential of your website. Mostly all SEO matters revolving around hosting are negative, since there are no real web hosting qualities that will help you to raise your websites SEO. But, first things first, what is web hosting and SEO?

SEO
This stands for Search Engines Optimization. It revolves around how your website is read and subsequently indexed by the search engines. This notion is often described as a value, where a website that is likely to be ranked higher in a search engines results pages is described as having a higher SEO value. A website may also be called SEO friendly, which means it is correctly set up so that it ranks higher in the search engines results pages.

Web hosting
This is where you purchase some server space from another company. The server is always online and available for anyone on the Internet to see. This means that you can put information into the space on the server (such as an HTML page) and other people using the Internet will be able to see it.

Restricted bandwidth
Your host may only offer you a certain amount of bandwidth. This is okay if you have small numbers of traffic, but if your website becomes heavily attended it is going to mean your viewers are going to be staring at a blank screen. If this happens too often, the search engines will lower your websites ranking and push you further down their search engine results pages.

Security
If your host does not run a secure server then it may come under attack from hackers, which is going to mean multiple system crashes, and you may even lose the information on your website. This means that your website is going to be offline for long periods of time, which is going to negatively affect your websites SEO value.

Viruses
It is up to your host to make sure that the server you are using is not infected with viruses (unless you are responsible for maintaining the server). If they do not do a good job of this then you will again be at the mercy of system crashes, which will lower your websites ranking on the search engine results.

Updates
Again, unless it is up to you to update the server, the host is supposed to do it regularly. If your host does not update on a regular basis then the server will be vulnerable to hackers and will have compatibility issues with current software. Both of these situations are going to negatively affect your websites SEO value.

Page completion time
Google judges some of your SEO value on how long it takes your website to finish loading. A lot of this responsibility falls on you and how you design your website, but your host may also add a drag factor, which will slow your progress onto the first page of the Google search results. If the host only provides a slow bandwidth then your page completion time is going to be slow. If the server is rarely defragmented and poorly updated then it will run slowly and cause problems. If the server is poorly maintained and poorly optimized it will slow down your page complete times.

The Up-Time
This should not be a problem unless your host is a really bad one. Your website is supposed to be online at least 98% of the time. If your host is not running your website for at least 98% of the time then you are going to suffer the consequences when the search engines notice. As you can imagine the longer and more often you are offline, the harsher the SEO punishment. Sadly, there is little you can do about this besides changing hosts (which many would recommend that you do).

The reaction of others
Do not forget that if you experience any of these problems it may seem temporary, but the people who link to you may notice your problems and break their links to you, which is going to negatively affect your websites SEO value.

1 comments :

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