What Does Web Hosting Have to Do with SEO and Search Ranking?

Online marketers are often asked the question – “does hosting affect a site’s ranking in the SERPs?”

The obvious answer to this question is ‘YES.’ The quality of hosting affects the SEO value of your website in more ways than one. In other words, a good SEO hosting service provider can help you rank better in the SERPs while allowing you to achieve your goals faster in the highly competitive industry.

To understand the concept better, let’s first discuss what the term ‘SEO web hosting’ means and how it affects a website’s performance in the search results.

SEO web hosting

Though there is no standard definition of SEO web hosting, it primarily refers to web hosting that caters to search engine optimization efforts. When looking for hosting for a new website, the owner should always consider a few essential factors, some of which are discussed below.

Firstly, make sure you go for a reputed hosting provider. Low-quality hosting can decrease your domain authority and drag your website down in the search results.

How does SEO get affected by hosting?

As you know, search engine optimization involves a set of rewarding tactics which you can apply to ensure the visibility of your website in the search engines. Through SEO efforts, you can also increase site exposure to the users. The quality of hosting can affect several aspects of your site. Some of them include:

• Page loading speed.
• Uptime and possible downtime.
• Security and protection against malicious attack.

Speed – Speed is an important attribute of performance, and it affects the on-page SEO value. At the first point, you should ensure that your website loads fast as it will not only help you to take advantage of SEO, but it will also let your users have a better experience to ensure more conversions.

To have a speedy website, you need two things such as a good hosting provider with excellent resources and data center infrastructure. It is also essential to have high-end hardware and well-built websites with code and images optimized for SEO to ensure speed.

Uptime and downtime – The term uptime refers to the time when a site is accessible to bots and users, and downtime is when a site is down and inaccessible by anyone. The crawlers check the availability of websites every once in a while and remove those that are not available.

Ensuring the availability and uptime of a website is the sole responsibility of the hosting providers, and failing on it will damage the reputation of your site. With increased downtimes, you may not only lose potential customers, but you also destroy the credibility of your brand. As per website SEO services, every site should strive to maintain maximum uptime.

Security – You may take all the right measures to protect your site, but if the service providers do not give any importance to secure hosting, then your site may soon be doomed. By compromising on security, you expose your site to hacking and other malicious attacks.

Check SEO awareness

This first thing you need to ensure is whether your hosting provider has any knowledge of SEO. If they do not even understand the basic concept of search engine optimization, then it is better for you to look for better options rather than compromising on it just for the reason of cost.

In some instances, it is noted that a few hosting service providers restrict the Google bot in robots.txt by saying they were initiating frequent visits to a website. For those who know what robots.txt is and what Google bots do may have understood the SEO knowledge of the said provider.

There are also providers who intentionally shut down websites upon finding a lot of traffic or instruct the webmasters to remove plugins like live chat despite promising best resources on the package because their servers could not handle such extra load.

The bottom line is that your hosting provider must restrain from anything which could potentially damage your site reputation and SEO value due to their ignorance or inefficiency.

Choosing an SEO friendly hosting provider

With a comprehensive experience of more than 12 years in dealing with various kinds of hosting providers and exploring all types of hosting packages, the first thing I can say is that it is not easy for a novice to choose an ideal hosting provider by seeing through the alluring offers they put forth.

However, the good news is that there are many reputed and reliable providers out there. The competition in this industry is fierce, and it compels the providers to ensure the best possible services to the consumers to sustain well. Having said this, you should not take all the providers at their face value, but need to understand the concept of hosting and successful SEO practices to shortlist the most reassuring option for you.

Some of the primary considerations while choosing an ideal hosting service provider are as below.

Years in service – This is not a quality factor, but of course a reliability factor. The company which has been in business for at least a decade offers a default reassurance about their quality of service. Moreover, with the experience that the company gained over many years of tight market competition and changing technology aspects, they will surely be able to offer you better services than a startup.

Reputation – You can check out what people (customers) are saying about different providers to understand their market reputation. You can go through the review sites or see the rating given by consumers. Try to get some genuine testimonials and feedback about the providers to take a well-informed decision.

Datacenter facility – Check if the provider has their own data center. Also, check if they are updated with the latest technology in terms of hardware and industry best practices.

Consider whether you are comfortable with a shared service, virtual private servers (VPS), or need a dedicated server. Above all, it is essential to know your actual hosting needs based on the nature of your website, the type of traffic you expect, volume goals, and also the geographical location you plan to focus on to ensure success.

Guest article written by: Timothy Moore is a digital marketing consultant with more than ten years of experience in internet marketing and SEO. You can read plenty of his website SEO services articles and digital marketing insights on the personal blog.