We often hear about how important SEO and site upkeep are when it comes to digital marketing. Rarely do we hear about the importance of finding reliable hosting for your website.
It’s true that proper SEO and site upkeep earn your site traffic. In turn, that traffic becomes leads. Leads become conversions.
High conversion rates mean high pay-out rates for you.
As such, you don’t want your web hosting services to hurt your site in any way.
How Can Your Web Hosting Services Damage Your SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a web development process. Web developers use it to influence search engine results. For more on SEO, check out a digital marketing firm such as Robo WP.
Search engines take into consideration a lot of things when ranking a site. Common factors include credible links, keyword usage, and content quality. Other factors taken into account are site speed, site availability, and server location.
Site Speed
No one sticks around for websites that take forever to load.
If you find that a website you’ve clicked on can’t seem to load, you close the tab. Plain and simple.
And search engine programmers know that.
The goal of search engines is to help Internet users find the content that they want. In essence, search engines are a tool of convenience.
For that reason, search engines take site speed into account when ranking websites.
Sites that don’t load quickly or at all are ranked lower than those that load quickly.
Site Availability
Constant availability indicates that someone is maintaining your website. It also suggests that you went through the trouble of finding reliable hosting for your site.
In contrast, spotty availability suggests no one is maintaining your site. As a result, search engines deem it unreliable and untrustworthy.
Seeming unreliable and untrustworthy isn’t the only negative effect of site unavailability.
When your site isn’t available, search engines can’t find it.
Search engines utilize special bots to read code on a website. When the website goes down, the bots can’t read the code.
As a result, your website gets overlooked.
When your site gets overlooked, it doesn’t rank. And when it doesn’t rank, it doesn’t appear in search engine results.
Server Location
Search engines also rank sites based on IP addresses. IP addresses are granted based on geographic location.
In essence, search engines rank partially based on geographic location.
Many Internet users who use search engines do so to find local businesses and places of interest. This ranking algorithm is included to help them through the process.
Picking a non-local server can affect more than just your target audience.
Part of any contract between a business and a web hosting service is communication.
When your web hosting service lives out of the area, you might not be able to communicate with them efficiently.
In a worst-case scenario, they could take your payment information and never return your messages. Your site could be experiencing problems for weeks before they get back to you.
If they get back at all.
The Negative Results Of Not Having Reliable Hosting
Websites deemed unreliable and untrustworthy don’t receive a high rank from search engines. They are placed at the bottom of the search results list, where a typical user wouldn’t bother to look.
In fact, websites determined to be very unreliable and untrustworthy aren’t ranked at all. They are blacklisted.
Websites that are blacklisted are moved from all future search engine results.
Removal from search engine results is devastating for your website’s performance.
Your website could successfully implement every other SEO tactic. If your site is blacklisted due to not having reliable hosting, it won’t matter.
Traffic and potential leads won’t be able to find you. And if they can’t find you, they can’t purchase your products or services.
Choosing Reliable Hosting
There are a few different measures you should take when choosing a web hosting services. These measures will help you ensure you’re getting reliable hosting that doesn’t hurt your SEO efforts.
The measures are as follows.
Uptime Statistics
No host is perfect. Power outages and system glitches are inevitable.
However, that is not to say they should be common occurrences for your web hosting service. Shoot for hosting that maintains availability at least 99.9% of the time.
On that note, be wary of any company that guarantees 100% coverage. Any host who’s been in the game long enough knows that 100% coverage is not possible.
Reviews
Forbes reports that 88% of customers read reviews prior to making a purchase. And for good reason, too.
Reviews give you a snapshot of how the company really does business. Sure, you can talk to a representative of the company. That representative will give you all the details concerning the company’s procedures, pricing, and billing process.
But you won’t know for yourself until you’re actually going through the motions with the company.
You won’t know, that is, unless you read other clients’ reviews of the company.
By reading reviews, you can get a sense of the company’s strengths and weaknesses. You also can get an idea of how it treats its clients.
Most importantly, you can find out whether the company is reliable and trustworthy.
IP Address Search
A quick search on Google can reveal where your prospective host has placed their servers.
Sometimes, hosts will list their physical addresses. If not, you’ll have to check out their IP address.
An IP address is simple enough to look up. You need only an IP checker. You can find numerous free IP checkers online.
More than likely, a host will use its own server to host its official website. Once you’ve found an IP checker, copy and paste the host’s site URL into the checker.
The checker will list all locations for that URL’s server.
Need More Information On Reliable Hosting? Contact Us!
At Site Uptime, we make fast connections our business. We provide our clients with a variety of resources on site speed, site monitoring, and other aspects of web development.
For more information on reliable hosting, please feel free to contact us!
