Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is always a big talking point when it comes to the digital world. Gaining visibility in search engines like Google and leveraging online search is the whole point of getting online, right?
When it comes to SEO, there are so many different factors to be considered when it comes to making a website rank including on-page factors like how your site has been coded as well as off page factors like backlinks. One area of this art that is not discussed or considered is web hosting and people can tend to forget that registration and hosting data can affect your search engine rankings in a big, big way.
When it comes to SEO, there are only ten slots that matter in the Search Engine Results Pages, which are the first 10. How often do you scroll to page 2 or 3 of Google to find a product or service? Remember, there are literally thousands of webmasters competing for these top 10 slots in Google. With this in mind, you should take advantage of any competitive advantage you have access to.
Optimizing registration and hosting information is one of the things you can do to improve search engine rankings. Not all hosting services are created equal and you should be really careful in who you to choose to work with on this front.
When researching hosting services, you should pay attention to the main factors that will affect your website’s SEO. We identify and unpack these factors below.
SPEED
One of the most important factors to consider is the speed at which your content will be served to your website users. In April 2010, Google announced that site speed was to become an important factor in their ranking algorithm.
It is critically important that your website and content loads quickly as this lends itself to a better user experience for anyone visiting your website. A good question to ask yourself is how long you would stick around waiting for a website to load when you are after information? To better understand how your site ranks from a user experience perspective, you can jump into Google Analytics and review your bounce rate and time-on-site. These stats can tell a story about how your site is performing.
Bounce rate refers to the number of people that land on a page on your site and leave without visiting other pages. Time-on-site is the amount of time a visitor stays on your site. When web pages take too long to load, people are inclined to click back to search results to find another website that will provide what they want or need in a faster fashion leading to increased bounce rates. Average time-on-site will plummet and eventually, Google will work out that your site is not giving users what they want and push you down in the Search Engine Results Pages. Need help setting up your Analytics tracking? Let us know.
ACCESSIBILITY
Your website should always be easily accessible by the searching public. Your website should be live 100% of time or as close to 100% as possible. Downtime should be minimal and this should be a key consideration when making a choice on hosting provider. Many hosting solutions can provide you guarantees around uptime.
A little downtime is not a problem and you would not be severely penalised by this however persistent downtime could have a really negative effect on your rankings in search engines. In order for Google to index your website, the Google crawler would need to crawl your site regularly for new content or updates. Assuming this crawler finds that your site is down, it will attempt the crawl later. Should the crawler return a number of times and your site is still down, you run the risk of being deindexed.
SERVER TYPE
There are generally three different types VPS, dedicated or shared hosting.
With shared hosting plans – you would need to share the available resources of a server (disk space, memory and CPU time) with other website owners.
A VPS or Virtual Private Server also requires that you share some of the server resources with other website owners however the number of people sharing these resources is much lower providing you more resources and better performance from your website hosting.
Dedicated hosting provides you full control of all the server resources, no sharing whatsoever.
If you need a hosting solution for your WordPress website, Caddie provide state of the art, purpose built hosting solutions which include your website updates, daily website malware scanning, access to a content delivery network for blazing fast speeds as well as your SSL security.
The hosting solution you select for your website can affect your SEO efforts significantly. Need some help with your website hosting? Get in touch and let’s see if Caddie can help you.
