How Web Hosting Affects SEO Results

You will often hear people sigh about the "rat race” and pine for a so-called "simpler time" 10, 20 or 50 years ago when everything was just right. The problem is, there never was such a time, and 50 years ago people were pining for an older era, too. However, there is one group of people who have no illusions about "good old days." Internet professionals, information technology (IT) workers and high-tech folks in general have no desire to go back to DOS 5.0, 5¼ inch floppies and 4.88MHz processors. They may have fond memories of visiting The Well over a phone modem, but they know that going back to that level of functionality would be ludicrous.

Tech pros spend a lot of time making the Web faster, easier and more efficient in ways most people don’t even know about. In fact, even some fairly net-savvy folks don't know how web hosting affects SEO results. Factors of good hosting are another set of line items in your SEO, and there are some best practices to follow for optimal results.

Up, down, all around

Most basically, if you don't have a dependable host that keeps your site up 99.99% of the time, you are at risk for being considered "kaput." That is, if your site is down when Google and the other search engines want to index your site, they will just skip right over you. Maybe you can survive this once, and the search engine crawlers will most likely come back again, but if it happens again you are sending bright red flags up the virtual flagpole. Your credibility is at stake.

There is a similar problem if you have a slow-loading site. Now, the term "slow" is relative, of course, but Google and the other big search engine operators are always thinking in terms of "user experience"—more specifically, a good user experience—and most Web users expect pages to load in seconds. If it takes too long to load, you annoy your visitor, hurting your user experience – and Google does not want to put annoying slow pages at the top of their results pages. Plus, search engines have been programmed to logically expect the most important information to be near the top of a page. If you have too much stuff on the page, haven't optimized your Flash graphics, rely on inferior audio/video streaming or otherwise put obstacles on the page, the search bots won't hang around waiting for long. If your fabulous new content is at the bottom of a molasses-speed page, it may not even get cataloged. All your creative work will be for naught.

Who, what, where

Real estate pros know the power of location, location, location. Smart Web strategists do, too. If you want to rank in a certain country, like where most of your business is done, you should to be hosted—or be seen as being hosted—in that same country. Again, it goes to both credibility and efficiency, and you need to remember just what it is that search engines are looking for, how to decide what they're seeing and what they do with the information.

The more you have happening on the Internet, the more you have to manage the process, get every bit of information you can and stay abreast of what Google, Bing and the other major players are doing—and how it affects you and your results. This means everything from adding fresh content and knowing how to handle Domain Name Server issues to understanding what all the numbers mean on the metrics/analytics report. There's a lot to it, and it doesn't happen with one person doing it all. However, one person needs to manage it all, and make some hard decisions.

The tech side and the "eyes of the spider"

Some of the hard decisions involve the nuts and bolts of the Web, the way that servers really function and code really runs.  The .htaccess files have a number of diverse and important functions, among which are authorization and authentication duties. These files often specify security restrictions for a particular directory (that's how "access" got in the name when the open-source Apache debuted). The files are also put into play for customized error responses, but most importantly, .htaccess files enable servers to control caching by browsers and proxies to reduce server load, used bandwidth and perceived lag.

With another technology, isapi rewrites, you can optimize dynamic content like e-stores and forums for indexing by popular search engines. You can also "proxy" content of one site into the directory of another, and create a virtual directory structure of the site that hides physical files and extensions. This helps when you want to move from one technology to another. The fact that isapi rewrite technology can return browser-dependent content, even for static files, is another efficiency that looks good to the search engines. What works for Google is usually the best route to the public.

Watch all your p's and q's, cover all the technical bases, and you can keep your site up to date, refreshed, available to search engines and SEO-optimized. There's a lot to manage, but the payoff is huge—and you don't even want to think about the downside! It's net oblivion if you mismanage things in the "eyes of the spider."