What Experts Recommend for Web Hosting and Why
When it comes to hosting, you have dozens of options to pick from. While you may host on some free servers, experts recommend to choose a paid hosting plan as paid packages come with more features and added security.
But do you know that web hosting can also impact your search engine ranking. While the hosting company may not directly affect your ranking, it does play a very important role in how well you rank on search engines.
So how does web hosting impact SEO? Let’s find out:
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The Location Matters
Most experts suggest you to host your website in a country that you are planning to target. While there is no solid information regarding this on Google, but the general consensus is that the location does impact the ranking.
You can find servers in all locations. However, if you’re targeting global users then the location of the server is not of much importance. In addition to this, you can choose target country from Google making the location irrelevant to an extent.
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Downtime Can Be a Killer
You must look for a web hosting provider who promises at least 99.9% up time. A website that’s down or offline is a killer. It does not only make you look unprofessional and causes you to lose credibility, but also results in poor search engine rankings.
Also think of the impact when a buyer lands on your site to make a purchase, but finds it dead. You’ll not only lose the potential buyer, but may also have to face negative reviews, which impact your SEO ranking as Google is said to take such reviews into consideration.
Google reaches a website by crawling. If your website is down, it will not be crawled, which may result in the page getting de-indexed if such a thing continues to happen.
While Google may recrawl your page again if it is down the first time, the whole process may slow down the time it takes for a new page to be indexed. This is a killer as new pages will take longer to appear on Google causing you to lose on potential clients.
Other than this, Google gives you warnings when there is an increase in 404 errors on your site. According to the official website, this may not only cause your website to go down in ranking, but also to stop being indexed.
Considering how difficult it is to rank well on Google, it is very important that you pick the right web hosting provider. Choosing the wrong one may cause you heavy losses when you think about the time and money spent in improving your search engine rankings.
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Your Security Is Important
Site security is very important to rank well on Google. A recent update now requires certain websites to have a SSL certificate if they wish to work properly on Google Chrome. While not directly linked to SEO, this important factors shows how much importance Google pays to the security of your site. And now with digital currency market growing rapidly and most online stores accepting such currency, the need to have a secure site is increasing as well.
According to a report published in May 2015, around 5% users receive malware when they visit a website. This means about 5 million users are infected, causing Google to pay more attention to security.
In addition to this, Google is said to be receiving an increasing number of complains regarding site security. A high number of such warnings may result in your website getting a penalty in the form of a decrease in rating. In a worst case scenario, your website may even get blacklisted.
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.
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There Are Added SEO Packages
A good hosting provider will provide you with SEO tools to help you rank your site better. While some such tools are paid, some web hosting providers may also provide you with free SEO tools.
You should ideally pick a provider who offers you great tools with added support. This way you will not have to look for third-party software as all would be available under one roof.
Here is a piece on how you can install install WordPress which is a platform that has fantastic website SEO capabilities. You can also have WordPress installed in less than 5 minutes.
The importance of a reliable web hosting provider is self explanatory. Make sure to choose a trusted name to make sure you do not have to compromise on your website’s ranking.