Hosting and SEO
January 23, 2008
Where you host your website is usually not high on the list of considerations when first addressing the issue of SEO and online marketing. Most people look first for a reliable host that meets their needs and they consider the business of marketing at a later date. This is a mistake. They’re immediate needs might include space, bandwidth, price or special features like free domain name for life. Whahoo!
All of these things are important. (Well, except for the free domain name) I’d rather pay the $10 a year and retain control of my name. Anyway, my point is that most people don’t know what’s important regarding SEO and your hosting. Without further delay, here’s a quick rundown of the important points regarding SEO and your website hosting.
1) Spend a little bit of money and host your site with a reliable hosting company. I’ve seen offers for as little as $1/mo. for a hosting account or even free hosting that’s bundled with a product or service as a special offer. If you care about your website and your business relies on the website to generate money, make sure that you’re files are sitting on a rock solid server that’s going to be up and running 24/7. It doesn’t pay to cut corners here. Whomever hosts your website is like your anchor; they’re the fuel for your website and it only takes one outage or a few minutes of slow response time to lose a potential paying customer or to bounce a search engine spider when they visit.
2) Don’t fall for bells and whistles like free domain names, thousands of megs of space, 10,000 autoresponders, free submission to a million search engines or free scripts. Focus on what’s important. Reliability, power and support. If your host provides these three requirements then they’ll probably provide you with most everything that you’ll need for a reasonable price. Everything else is a bonus if you can get these three necessities.
Do your research and read reviews about the host that you’re considering. Find out what people are saying and ask them to provide third party stats on their uptime. Ask them to provide a server uptime and network uptime guarantee. Ask them what type of server you’ll be hosted on and how often they upgrade their servers. Ask them how many sites they host on one server, how many sites on each IP address and make sure to read the fine print if you know you need additional bells and whistles or if yo expect your traffic to increase dramatically. Just don’t base your decision on a free $10 domain name.
3) Don’t allow a hosting company to submit your site to the search engines and definitely don’t use any software that they provide as a bonus feature. I only mention this here because I’ve seen this offered in the past by multiple hosting companies and it’s something you should shy away from. If you’re seriously interested in SEO you should not use automated submission software or services that mass submit you to every crappy search engine and directory on the web. In general this will probably do more harm than good so don’t fall for it. If you can submit your own site to the top 10 search engines and focus on the best and most relevant directories for your niche you’ll do just fine. After all, Google commands more than 60% of the search traffic so focus on writing great, highly targeted and optimized content and Google and other minor SEs will find you.
4) When you first start out you’ll probably have to go with a shared hosting program. What this means is that a host will put hundreds, possibly thousands of domain names on one server and IP address. In general this is not a bad thing if you’re just starting out. Ideally you should consider eventually investing the money for your own dedicated server so you have control over the full resources of the server. If you’d like to know how many sites are hosting on your IP address click here.
5) A dedicated, C-Class IP address is not required if you want to rank well. (Regardless of what you’ve heard) In the past there have been many people claiming that you have to be on a dedicated IP address if you want to rank well. This has been debunked many times by Google and they’ve answered the question directly.
Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!
What you do need to do is make sure that your host has their shared hosting configured correctly. If you host with a quality, reputable host this will probably not be an issue.
If you have multiple sites that link to each other you should probably host them on different IP addresses though to get the full impact of the links. Some might disagree with me. I think there has been some confusion regarding Google’s statements about dedicated IP addresses and the impact on your links. The last thing Google wants to see is a large group of sites linking to each other that are clearly owned and operated by the same person or company. So if you own multiple sites that link to each other, play it safe make sure they’re on separate IP addresses so you’re not penalized for this tactic.
6) Do not host your site with a “free” web host. Anyone that gives something away for free is not going to give you the quality and support that you need. This is essentially an unsustainable business model most of the time and they’re shooting to deal with the bottom of the barrel. Enough said.
7) There is a minor thing to note when you’re moving your site to a new web host. Make sure that you make the change to your DNS and leave your website up on the old server for several days or longer. This will ensure that your site is still available for Google to visit if the DNS does not fully propagate for some time.
Lastly, consider hiring an SEO guru first and then asking them who they host with. Chances are they’ll be able to recommend somebody that they’ve already had success with and you’ll be in good hands. (with hosting and seo)
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