Web Hosting & SEO
Many business owners don’t realize how important their web hosting platform can be for the success of their website and online presence. Your website needs to run fast, but it also needs to be optimized for search engines. Website speed is a factor in how well your website performs in search. let’s take a look at how your website hosting service has a direct effect on how your website performs in search engine rankings.
1. Your Website Will Need to be Secure –
Website security is often overlooked, but what’s a website without security? Your website needs to have the proper security features in place, as well as an SSL Certificate. This provides you and your visitors with a level of trust with each other online. The more you can build this trust, the higher your website will rank in search engines.
2. Your Website Needs to be Fast –
Speed is still one of the most important considerations for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines use speed as one of determining how fast your website loads and ranks on page 1 of search results. If the search engine you are using, such as Google, sees a website with slow load times, it will assume that the website is not user-friendly and push your website down in search results.
3. Website Visitors Look for Fresh Content –
One of the most important factors when it comes to your SEO ranking is how fresh your content is. If you have a short content lifespan (less than one month), you will not rank as high in search engines. The more visitor traffic your website receives, the fresher your content should be to maintain your ranking positions in search engines.
4. Your Website Can Be Critical to Your Brand –
Just like any other product or service, your website is critical to your business’s success. If you have a business with a brick-and-mortar location, the chances of needing to take the website offline for any reason is virtually nonexistent. This is not the case for most small businesses out there. Online marketing and SEO are important to a good portion of online consumers today. The more time you spend on your website and on building good web pages that are responsive, user friendly, and in compliance with search engine standards, the higher your site will rank in search engines.
5. Minimize website downtime
Imagine the impression you will make when someone visits your website, and receive a message such as “404 not found” or “500 internal server error”. These types of messages occur when your website isn’t hosted by a company that provides enough resources, or can’t handle enough server load. Spend the money on quality hosting and you will definitely receive a decent ROI. When visitors reach your website, it will load quickly, and they will be able to find what they need without errors or crashes.
6. Your hosting company can build online trust
If your hosting is secure, you won’t have to worry about your business email being flagged for spam. You’ll be less likely to get hacked and have a hacker send spoofed emails or emails generated from your website. These types of issues can end up getting your domain flagged as spam and making you less trusted by Google. This isn’t 100% reliant on just your hosting company, but it can be a large contributor to your website security. A good hosting company will scan your website documents for malware or security vulnerabilities and look for any plugins that require security patches. Excellent hosting companies will install those patches for you, keeping the entire hosting server more secure and stable.
Managed Web Hosting
When it comes to a quality website hosting company, you get what you pay for. Make sure you are spending your money on a hosting service that takes care of you and provides the most secure hosting environment possible. Faster, more secure servers will ensure your website loads quickly and is secure, so you can focus on great content and lead generation. If you are a busy business owner, you should look for a managed hosting service, where a local web developer manages your hosting for you. This is important because you have someone you know, who also knows what they are doing. They will watch over your website and make sure that it runs efficiently. You can focus on running your business, but when something goes wrong, you will have someone trusted to call upon to resolve any technical issues quickly.