Does Hosting affect SEO?

Does Hosting affect SEO?

A web host is the server where your web site is stored. Generally Search Engine Optimization efforts overlook hosting features. But hosting affects SEO both directly and indirectly. The primary aim of Search Engine Optimization is to generate more revenues for your online business. Hosting servers affect user experience to a great extent thereby affecting the profitability of the web site. 

Effects of Hosting on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to minimize them:

• Spiders crawl web sites to index them. If your hosting server is down at the time the crawler visits your web page, it leaves your page without crawling. Consequently, no indexing happens and you lose an opportunity to get your site optimized. Check the reliability of your Hosting server.
• Generally small to medium sized web sites are hosted on shared servers. The server hosts other sites which you are unaware of. If any of these sites is blocked as a spammer and is de- indexed by search engines, your web site also stands a chance to go down in ranking on SERPs. Ensure that you do not share a server with a potential spammer. For e-commerce and other larger web sites opt for a dedicated server.
• Link Building is an important aspect of SEO. One common feature of Link Building is to have a network of web sites that link to your main web site. When spiders crawl a web site, they index all aspects of a web page including IP addresses. It is recommended to have different IP addresses for all your network web sites.
• Robot.txt file plays a crucial role in directing the robots/ spiders on your web page. If robot.txt file is set to disallow robots, no indexing happens. Most hosting companies leave this blank or does not include robot.txt.  Verify the status of your robot.txt file from your hosting service provider.
• Now coming to the actual user of your web site-the visitor.  If your server speed is slow, web page loading time increases and it is a big put off for visitors. Visitors bounce off your site in no time. Recently major search engines like Google have also started considering page loading time as a determinant of PageRank.
• Once you have zeroed in on your Hosting service provider, ensure that your subscription is for a minimum period of 1 year or more. This assures search spiders that your web site is genuine and not built for spamming purposes

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