SEO and Web Hosting: How Are They Related

What is the relation between SEO and webhosting. Understanding how a host is able to affect your websites SEO is a good thing to know. It will not make a massive amount of difference in many ways, but it may help you decide upon which host to choose.

It is a little like knowing that Rolls Royce is good at making engines. The fact that you know they are good at making engines is not going to affect how well your Rolls Royce car runs, but it may help you when you are planning to buy a car next time.

In many cases you will find that SEO issues involving your host revolve more around “what If” scenarios. Such as, “what if my website had a million hits in one week, could my host handle this traffic?” Or “what if there is a virus that affects Windows, will my host have updated enough to protect against it?” The effects of a host may have a few positive effects, but it is the negative effects of your host that cause the most problems. This article covers some of those effects.

SEO And Web Hosting

So overall its really important to know few of the important points. The most important one is the Page completion time. You can use few of the online services like GTmetrix, Pingdoom, WebPageTest to check your website speed. They will also provide you with loading graph, which will indicate how your website and web server responds when any requests are made.

So in this article we are going to cover :

Page completion time
Your Host’s Capability
UP-Time

Page Completion Time : Most Important Factor

This is a measurement that Google uses to help them rank your site. In terms of SEO, if your pages load and complete quickly then you will be ranked higher up Google’s search engine results pages. The page render time (how long it takes to appear after its link is clicked) is important, but what is more important is the pages completion time.

This is how long it takes from the link being clicked to the page fully loading. This time may be influenced by your host if they it has a slow bandwidth, if the server is defragmenter, poorly maintained, poorly updated and/or poorly optimized.

How many users can your host handle?

If you have a website that has a few thousands of visitors per month then it is highly probable that your host can handle that amount of traffic. Even shared hosts can handle that sort of traffic from each purchasing party. If however you are getting very large amounts of viewers, it may result in your website not being seen by the masses.

Worse still it may slow down your page loading times to the point where people do not even bother to look at your site. This becomes a big SEO problem if it happens on a regular occasions because Google will punish you for not letting people see your site, or for having it load very slowly. This is a bigger problem for those who get a lot of traffic at certain points of the day, for example if your site has lots of young visitors that log on straight after school.

Up-Time : What’s Its Importance

Your host is supposed to ensure that your website can be seen all the time. Apart from the odd brief occasions when your websites host goes offline (usually to update the server), there is no need for any form of “down-time”. Your host should have an “up-time” (as oppose to down-time) of 99%. If the host has your website “down” (aka offline) for more than 10% of the time then Google is very likely to punish you.

What’s Its Importance Considering SEO

The working links to your website will appear to be broken a lot of the time. Google will punish you for being offline. There is also a factor relating to other webmasters. There are tools that check a link’s strength. Some webmasters use them to check their internal and outgoing links. If they run a check whilst your website is offline, it will look like a broken link, and they will delete their link to you from their website/domain. This will also damage your websites SEO.