When someone who is building a website wants to reach a high-ranking position on search engines, they need to optimize the website. Search engine optimization isn’t a new thing and a lot of people know the most popular SEO tactics in use. These include authority backlinks, SEO friendly content, voice search, and many others.

And if you are running a small online business, you also need to choose the best SEO software for small businesses. This type of tool will give you all the features you need at an affordable price, thus helping you stay competitive in your industry.

However, that is not enough. There is one thing that affects your SEO that not many people are aware of – web hosting. In fact, SEO and web hosting go hand in hand in the digital world, and if you want to ensure your website’s success, you need to choose a good hosting plan.

These hosting plans include Shared Hosting, Windows Hosting, Wordpress Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Servers. You can choose the plans as per the requirements of your website.

If you are in Australia or are targeting the Australian market, you can check for the fastest web hosting servers at Hosting Foundry.

But why exactly is this so important? Well, there are a few reasons and you can read about them below.

Website speed

Everyone hates slow-loading websites, but that doesn’t mean that just people hate it. Search engines see it as a flaw as well. The ideal loading time for your website should be under 2 seconds. This makes users happy and provides you with one of the most crucial SEO ranking factors – speed.

Major search engines take the loading speed of websites into consideration when they create their ranking algorithms. Google sees websites that can’t load quickly as less valuable than those that can, so it doesn’t want to assign them a high-ranking position.

And if you don’t want your website to be ruined by poor loading speed, you need to choose a good web host. This is something you should invest in right away if you want to prevent slow loading speed, but also page timeouts and server errors. 

Uptime vs. downtime

Downtime happens when a website is inaccessible because of problems with its hosting. Some downtime is inevitable, even if you have the best and most expensive web hosting plans. However, downtime should be a rare occurrence and if it’s happening to your website often, that means you have poor web hosting.

A good web host should provide around 99.9% uptime, anything below that is unacceptable. Downtime isn’t just annoying to you and your website visitors, it’s also a big factor in Google’s ranking algorithms.

Search engines try to provide users with the websites they find the most useful. When someone goes online and types a few keywords, Google will search the web and categorize all content it finds to provide users with the best possible results.

But what happens when your website is down? If this is a frequent occurrence, Google will see your website as untrustworthy and won’t send users to it. And even if you apply various other SEO strategies, frequent downtime due to bad hosting will ultimately cause your website to fail.

If you are running an eCommerce store and looking for hosting that can keep up with your needs, there are a few good choices, and one of them is Woocart. To find out if it works for your online store, make sure to consider all of its features, including Woocart pricing.

Security

Website security is important for a lot of reasons, especially when you’re running an online business. However, not many people know that it’s crucial for SEO as well. If you choose a web hosting with bad security, your website’s ranking can plummet significantly.

Websites with low security are a prime target for hackers that could do a lot of damage to your website. If a hacker manages to break through your security, they could do several things to your website that affects your SEO:

• Implement malicious code. If a hacker puts any kind of malicious code into your website, it will put website visitors at risk. And if Google detects this code, it will give a warning that your website contains malware.
• Add unexpected redirects. Hackers could also implement redirects on your website that lead to harmful pages.
• Add incoming and outgoing backlinks. Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO. Quality backlinks will ensure a high-ranking position, but bad ones will do the opposite. If hackers add backlinks that lead to unsafe and malicious content, it will decrease the credibility of your website.

If any of these happen to you, Google will penalize your rankings and limit the traffic your website receives, as it is now considered unsafe. In some cases, your website could even be deleted off the internet. This is why a good bitcoin vps provider with great security is a necessity.

Server location

Location is another important factor search engines take into consideration. Your website won’t have the same ranking in different countries, and Google takes these into consideration when ranking your website:

• user’s location
• website’s location
• web host’s location

So, why is server location important for SEO? If you choose a cheap hosting, there is a high chance that it won’t be located in the country you’re targeting. And if your server has an IP address located in a different country, you probably won’t be able to reach your target audience as effectively as you would like.

Additionally, your server location can affect page loading speed. If people are located in a country where your server isn’t, the page loading speed will also decrease.

Therefore, it is smart to choose a web hosting provider that is located in the same country as you or one that has a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that hubs around the world. For instance, >Verpex is a great global hosting provider which has servers around the world to ensure speed and efficiency.

SSL support

One of Google’s most important ranking factors is whether or not a website’s URL starts with HTTPS. Unlike those which start with HTTP, these websites have an extra layer of security because they use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to move data.

According to research, 90.2% of the browsing time on Chrome is spent on HTTPS pages. And if two websites have equal quality signals for a search, the website with HTTPS will beat out the one with HTTP.

Statistics also show that 57.5% or all websites use HTTPS, and that includes some of the most popular websites online such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. So, make sure to find a host that has SSL support. This extra layer of security will help show Google your website is secure and trustworthy.

Good technical support

A web hosting provider with good technical support is of great importance to your website. If your site happens to go down, there is no time to panic. You need to contact technical support right away to fix whatever issue has happened.

There are various reasons why your website can crash and influence your ranking. Some of them include:

• overload due to high traffic
• viruses, malware, and other harmful content
• improper maintenance

A good web hosting provider has 24/7 support all year round and employs a dedicated and capable staff. If a website crashes or has any other issue that you can’t fix in time, your SEO will be affected. Not only that, but people will stop visiting your website if they notice issues haven’t been fixed in a while.

How to choose an SEO-friendly web hosting provider?

SEO rankings are crucial to the success of your business, so you need to choose wisely. There are a lot of good providers online and it is hard to be sure whether or not you’ve made the right choice.

There are a couple of different things you should take into consideration when choosing a hosting provider. We’ve already covered the basics of what good web hosting needs to have, but just because a provider says they have good speed, great security, and other benefits, it might not be true.

This is why you should look for a trustworthy provider with great reviews. Find out what customers say about a certain provider and then decide for yourself.