Search engine optimization has an enormous role in how search engines like Google rank your website. When you add elements like meta descriptions, like page titles, and keywords, it helps the search engines in finding your site and displaying it to people who search the relevant terms. Search engines also give higher ranking to websites whose page load time is fast and have little or no downtime. Very few people realize the significance of a good web host and that it can have a huge impact on your website’s ratings. Hosting companies may not directly affect your site’s ranking, but they play a very important role in how well your site ranks on the search engines. The quality of your web host can actually affect SEO by hurting or improving your page load times, database connection, security, server quality, and accessibility of your site.
If your website is generating a lot of traffic, but your server is not prepared for such heavy traffic, it could crash. A sudden wave of traffic could quickly overload your server. In case of a shared server, your site could face downtime even if someone else’s website is being hosted on your server experiences an increase in traffic. Your site being frequently down can have a negative impact on your search rankings. Search engines will not send any traffic your way if your website is incapable of handling it.
When it comes to web hosting, you have a lot of options to pick from. While you have the option to host on some free servers, it is recommended that you choose a paid hosting plan because paid packages come with a lot more features and added security. A good hosting provider also provides SEO tools to help you rank your website better. While some of the tools are paid, some web hosting providers also provide you with free SEO tools. You should pick a provider who not only offers you great tools but also provides you with added support. This way you do not have to look for third-party software and all of it would be available under a single roof. The importance of a trustworthy web hosting provider is self-explanatory. You need to choose a trusted name to ensure that you will never have to compromise on your website’s ranking. To experience good web hosting services, visit hostiserver.com for managed web hosting along with technical support.
Choosing a web hosting service is an important step. Normally website owners think all the web hosting companies to be same and thus end up choosing the services based on the cost. In reality, it is the opposite. You will only get the hosting services that you pay for. There are multiple important factors that have to be considered to ensure the site performs to its potential and reaches its intended audience. Here are some factors through which a web host can affect your website’s search engine ranking.
1. Speed
Your site’s loading speed is an important element of your search engine rankings. Decreased load time is inversely proportional to web views. You must have experienced this yourself with a website that took too long to load, and you chose to leave it instead of waiting around for it. Will you ever return to that website? No. because of such a bad experience you will decide to visit some alternate site that provides the same information or services. Google makes sure to take pointers and decreases the ratings of such websites that offer the users a bad experience. Google consistently makes updates to their algorithm that emphasizes how quickly a webpage loads. The faster the website, the better the user experience will be. Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam Team, has also highlighted the effects of page load time on a website’s performance. It is a fact that if a website takes more than three seconds to load, the visitors will switch to the next possible option. Therefore a website’s page load time is a very delicate factor for its reputation. A website with high load time gets a high bounce rate that will affect its search engine rankings. A good web host’s job is to decreases the load time of a website by using latest technologies that cause a high volume of traffic.
It is vital that your site loads as fast as it can to ensure that your site’s visitors have a positive experience so that they can be converted into customers. Make sure to choose a hosting provider with enough resources to facilitate a fast website. A good web host must have efficient hardware and solid infrastructure in the datacenter. If your hosting provider is below average, it will not matter how well your site is built.
2. Downtime Can Be a Killer
Websites crash under heavy traffic all the time, but it costs them a lot of customers and views. Without a web host, your website is a ticking bomb, ready to go offline. Same is the case if your website is being hosted by a bad web host. A decent web hosting provider will promises at least 99.9% uptime. A website that’s down or offline all the time is a killer. Not only does it cause you to lose credibility and make you look unprofessional, but it also results in poor search engine rankings. Imagine if a buyer visits your site to make a purchase and instead finds it dead. You will not only be losing a potential buyer but may also get negative reviews. All of this impacts your SEO ranking as Google is takes such reviews into consideration. A good ranking on Google is not a walk in a park, which is why it is very important for you to pick the right web hosting provider. Choosing the wrong web host can cause you heavy losses considering the time and money you spent in order to improve your search engine rankings.
Downtime will not only affect a website’s overall performance, but it will also bring down its SEO. For instance, a website is down and is not showing up on the search engine, the search engine will get a query of a relatable content of that site, but it will not be able to find the website because it is offline. This will degrade the website’s SEO and increase the bounce rate which will directly affect the website’s authority.
3. Security Is Important
Site security is another very important variable that can affect ranking on Google. A recent update requires certain websites to now have an SSL certificate if they wish to work properly on Google Chrome. While not directly linked to SEO, this factor shows how much important security of your site is to Google. With digital currency market growing quickly, the need to have a secure site is growing as well.
According to a report, 5% of users receive malware whenever they visit a website. This means around 5 million users are infected, which is causing Google to pay more attention to the security of a site. Google is also said to be receiving an increasing number of complaints regarding website security. A high number of such warnings can get your website a penalty in the form of a decreased rating. Your website may even get blacklisted in a worst-case scenario. To prevent such major damage, make sure to secure your website today by picking a hosting provider that has secure servers and added plugins or barriers to protect against attacks.
No matter how much secure your website is, your host also needs to take the proper security measures or your site will remain exposed to hackers. In the latter scenario, you will be putting sensitive business information and the client data at risk if it gets hacked or is compromised by malware. Additionally, if this isn’t corrected quickly, you may also be penalized by search engines. If your hosting service is housing illegal or malicious sites, you will be penalized for having a related IP address, and consequently, your search engine rankings will suffer. This is why always check hosting services reviews to help you avoid any SEO headaches.
What can you do?
After reading all the factors that can affect your search engine rankings, the question is, what can you do? The simple and short answer to the question is that you should get your website a web host. But that is not all. Your job is not to just get a web host, but the best one. A web host has to create a positive difference in your website’s performance; otherwise you will be wasting your time and money in addition to putting your website at potential risk.
The reliability of a host’s uptime is something you should research before deciding on a web host. If your website is slow or offline during the non-peak hours like late at night or if your site is sluggish or inaccessible, it means that search engines are locked out of your website. When search engines are unable to crawl around your website, they will not be able to determine what steps you have taken to optimize your site for SEO. If the search engine does not know a phrase or a keyword that is included or does not have a clue that you have updated your website content, then it will not be indexed, and your search rankings will badly suffer. You are at risk of being wiped off from a search engine’s database if your website shows up as offline for the search engines too often. To avoid the hassle of having to petition so you can be reintroduced into search results, do some research to make sure your web host provider is keeping your site live day and night. You can also use a service to monitor your site so it can alert you if the website goes down.
Many people find shared hosting as the best option for them despite the possibility of slow pages. As long as your server is of high quality, page speed should not be a big problem. Before you decide on a web host, learn about how their servers are managed. A server that is fully-managed and has knowledgeable tech support will monitor your shared server and will also make sure that it’s functioning well. If you want to improve your website’s performance and ranking, you can always switch to another hosting plan like Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. Each type of hosting plan has its own pros and cons. Select a web hosting plan that best fits your requirements.
Experts suggest that you should host your website in the country you are planning to target. The consensus is that the location has a significant effect on the ranking. However, the location of the server will not be of much importance if you are targeting global users.
It is possible that hosting providers may not understand the basics of what influences search engine rankings. This means that they could accidentally hurt the SEO measures you have taken to optimize your website without you realizing it. This is why you should be doing your homework on your hosting provider so none of their policies will negatively impact your website’s customer experience or the search rankings. Do not forget to check what other users are saying about a prospective provider to see if they have a reputation for applying disastrous tactics without their client’s knowledge.
Conclusion
A website that is hosted by a bad hosting company is destined to become a disaster and the reasons mentioned above should be enough to shed light on that. If your website is being hosted on a shared host, you should pick a better hosting option or otherwise, you will get nothing but poor SEO rankings, downtime, sudden website crash, and greater load time. A good web host optimizes your website with 99.9% uptime, decreased load time, and better search engine rankings as your website will most probably be online throughout the year.
