Web Hosting and SEO
SEO Tutorials | November 24th, 2007 | 1 CommentThere are so many things that are related to search engine optimization that one even forgets about. The fact that SEO is not a science and you can’t simply take a book, read and learn seo makes things even more difficult even tho there are some great books for seo beginners such as the Aaron Walls SEO Book. Books like that discuss the basics of SEO, which are indeed extremely important to know, especially if are just entering in the search engine optimization “world”.
The fact why I like more trial and error type of learning seo is because the seo books will not really reveal what is making the authors of those books millionaires in this highly competitive business. Once we make a mistake when optimizing our website or blog and we see how that negatively effects our site, we get it recorded in our brain to not ever repeat that same mistake. Same happens when we do something that really does help our site on the search engine rankings, so we repeat it again and again. Once we have read around the net about SEO (is it on page or off page optimization) we know what we should and what we should not do, but than we will hit on a topic that is pretty unfamiliar to us but yet has to do with what our interest is, search engine optimization, such as web hosting.
The disinformation is our worst enemy in search engine optimization, some times these disinformations are created with the only intend to confuse us and other times they are created just because the claimer does not have enough knowledge in regard or enough informations (he would know, if he learned from trial and error instead of reading what others say).
How is your web hosting related to SEO?
You are most probably wondering and asking yourself that same question as you are reading this seo article on how web hosting and seo are related to each other. There are few points on how SEO and Web Hosting are actually related and I will classify them in priority (for me) which will reflect your SEO work.
- Your site is always reachable
- Your site is not hosted on same server where bad/spam sites are hosted
- Geo Location of the server with Geo targeting visitors/customers
These are the three reasons that I do give value of when I think about SEO and Web Hosting in a sort of relation. But lets discuss each part separately and see if I can explain them to you better.
Your site is always reachable
This is plain simple for any perspective, if your site is often down than it is like you don’t have a site at all. Personally If I visit a site for at least two times and I never reach to read the content I am most likely never going to get back to that site in a short period of time (unless I am desperate to reach that site). From a user perspective you will most probably lose any returning visitor to your site if the server slow loads or is unreachable, all the hard SEO work you have done has gone nowhere as returning visitors are the most valued part of the all search engine optimization and search engine marketing, thats the main reason why we do SEO, to gain more visitors and to convert them into daily visitors or customers (if we are offering services).
The other bad side of a often unreachable site due to server crashing too often are the search engine spiders. The search engine spiders crawl our site to get content from and present that content to users that perform a search query with keywords that are related to our content. If the spiderbot is unable to reach and crawl our content it will have no content to display on the search engine page results. In the worst case, if a spider bot will not be able to reach our site for several times it will get in conclusion that our site is not available anymore and will most likely stop coming back, which is really bad for search engine optimization as we desperately need that spiderbot to crawl our content.
Not hosting your site on servers that host spam sites
Hosting your web site on servers that also host spam sites will not only hurt your site on search engine optimization but it will also seriously hurt your interaction with your customers if you have a business website. Webmail anti spam monitors usually categorize the spam sites basing on their IP. Once a IP is marked as spam IP it will reflect to all web sites and email servers hosted on that IP without distinguishing the domain name or the whois information of the domain name owner.
For our luck, antispam bots are not working in the same way, but work in a very similar way. The good part is tho that if ever you get into a trouble you can always contact the webmaster (or antispam team) of the search engine that categorizes your site as spam and resolve the problem if you are in no way related to spamming. This is not a big trouble as far as it regards search engine optimization but I would any time prefer to avoid all that procedure.
Geo Location and Geo targeting visitors
This is the sweet part and is the one with most disinformations I have ever seen. If our position in the SERPs is any how related to the IP or the physical location of the server where we have our web site hosted than we can anyway resolve this pretty quickly, but it is always better to prevent instead of cure.
The geographical location of the physical position of the server where our website is hosted it does indeed have impact on our search engine rankings, even tho that is minimal. Search engine spider bots and their complicated algorithm do store and related the Geo location of the IP where our website is hosted, this helps the search engines to determine which market is your business mainly targeting online. Of course, it would be much easier to determine that based on the language of the content instead of on the IP address, as i said, it does impact our SEO but to minimal limits. Lets take an example, you have a website which Is in English language, but this language is wide spoken , in USA in UK, Australia etc, but you primary market you wish to target is UK and your domain is under a general TLD rather than a specific ccTLD. Even tho in the content you are using the word “UK or United Kingdom” or any city within that country, having your website also hosted on a server that is physically located somewhere in UK will indeed help the search engine determine which market you are targeting (it does help, but it is not crucial). What would help more is a domain under a specific ccTLD and backlinks from website sites under the same ccTLD, these type of techniques will help your site to rank higher in the SERPs of Google for UK (google.co.uk).
There are other techniques you could use to SEO Optimize your website and target visitors from a specific geo location, but lets give a space for another article on SEO and Geo targeting instead of include them all in one single post. If you would like to follow up on the next articles please subscribe to my RSS read and be able to read my seo articles and tutorials in real time.
[…] late of November I wrote an article that would describe how web hosting and seo are related one to each other. The post was published before this blogs host went all weird. I was […]