Today’s post is by James Daniels. James is a freelance writer, business enthusiast, a bit of a tech buff, and an overall geek. He is also an avid reader, who can while away hours reading and knowing about the latest gadgets and tech, whilst offering views and opinions on these topics. For more information contact James here: [email protected]

When considering your website’s SEO, you may not think about the web hosting provider you choose. However, it’s important to understand that potentially, your web host could have a significant impact on your website’s SEO and ranking in the Google SERPs. What many business owners do not realize is that their campaign for prominence in the Google search results doesn’t actually start with keywords and analytics, it actually begins when you choose a web hosting company and pick a plan that suits you and your site. Whilst a good web host is not going to directly boost your rankings, making the wrong choice could cause serious problems for your site.

How Web Hosting Affects SEO

Site Loading Time

Google takes a range of factors into consideration when it comes to allocating favor to websites, and one of these is site loading time. Recently, Google has been favoring those websites which offer a better experience to their users, with sites that load up quickly and efficiently offering the best experience to their viewers. Because of this, choosing a web hosting provider that offers the best efficiency and quick loading time for your website can actually help your SEO. Poor loading times can be hugely detrimental to the user experience, therefore choosing a cheap web host and opting for a hosting plan where your website will be sharing a server with a lot of others could mean downtime and slow load times during peak periods, affecting your SEO. See certahosting.co.uk for more information on choosing the best web host.

Accessibility

Choosing a web host that offers all the speed in the world won’t mean a thing to your SEO if your site is down for a lot of the time, making it inaccessible to users. Sites which are consistently unavailable can rack up a number of SEO penalties, especially if the problem goes unfixed. Prominent, high-quality web hosting companies will offer highly reliable, well-maintained servers that are unlikely to go down. That being said, these servers may well go down from time to time, meaning that it’s important to choose a web host that offers a good level of support, allowing you to get in touch and request that a problem is repaired as soon as it arises.

Shared Hosting

The impact that shared hosting has on your site’s SEO is a topic that is regularly discussed, with experts having differing opinions. Whilst some believe that sharing your server with questionable websites can be detrimental to your own SEO results due to certain hosts having reputations for serving bad, spammy clients, others say that the other sites hosted on the server that you use don’t make a scrap of difference as it is all down to the SEO practices that you use. On a number of different occasions, Google has pointed out that other sites on a shared web host should not affect your own.

Good SEO is essential to improving your online presence and gaining a good business reputation. The web hosting provider that you choose can help or hurt your site’s rankings.

Question: Do you think that web hosting affects SEO? How? You can leave your comments or your questions, by clicking here.