5 Tips to Optimize Web Hosting for Search Engine Optimization

Choose Web Hosting in Country You’re Targeting

The country or region where your websites are hosted matters for search engine optimization. Matt Cutts stated that having your websites hosted in the country you are targeting makes a difference to your rankings. That means if your website is hosted in the UK, and people in the UK search in Google, your website will come higher than if it would be hosted in the US.

Choose to host your website in the country where you receive the majority of your traffic from. You may be able to request which country your website is hosted in, ask your hosting company.

Check IP Address

The IP address of your website corresponds with the space where the website is stored on the server. Some larger companies or resellers will buy or rent purpose built servers with a hosting company. However, for your average blogger or small business, you will rent space on a server. If you are on a budget package, it is likely your website shares server space with other websites. Generally speaking that is fine, however, it can cause problems if the websites you share space with have Google penalties. For instance, if they have malware or have been blacklisted. The problem is that if you share an IP address with a dodgy site, the IP address may be blacklisted which will affect your website. Webmaster tools will tell you if your IP address is affected, and you can also check with online tools. I am not 100% sure how this works with websites hosted in the cloud where one website may move between servers.

Maximize Website Speed

Website speed can be affected by many factors such as the size of your website, pages, images, the structure of the coding, and your hosting. Website speed will increase if you go for a premium package, however, you can also get fast speeds if you go for a budget package. Check what the download speeds are from the various hosting providers before making a purchase.

Maximum Uptime

Uptime is the time your website is accessible for. It is usually expressed as a %. If your website is frequently down, it will affect your bounce rate, time spent on site, and other ranking factors. Look for an uptime of 99%+. Also, if you anticipate any of your content going viral, you may need your hosting to be flexible so the website doesn’t crash or cost you a fortune if you get an influx of hits in a short period of time.

Diversify Web Hosting

Internal links are important in SEO. That is links from one web page on a website to another within the same website. Links between your websites are also important to improve your search engine optimization. If you have several great websites, you can get some great links between them, and you control the anchor text too. These links are especially good if the websites are in overlapping niches such as business and marketing. They can still be strong links even if in unrelated niches. To give the backlinks increased power, it is important that the websites have different IP addresses. Having hosting with different web hosts or on different servers with the same host helps you achieve that.