Importance of hosting in SEO

Hosting is an important part of search engine optimisation, and should be the first thing you should look at when optimising your website. I thought I would give you a few useful tips when looking for hosting.

1. Location of your Hosting
If you are looking to mainly target the UK then I suggest you get your website hosted in the UK. Google does give preference in the UK search results for sites hosted in the UK. If your site is a .com hosted in the US chances are you won’t appear in the UK search results. To combat this you should change to UK hosting. Alternatively you could set the geographical target of the site to the UK in Google Webmaster Tools, but this has less of an effect.

2. Get a unique IP address
I would say it is a good idea to ensure your site has its own IP address. You don’t want your site to share IP addresses with porn and gambling sites as this could lead to Google considering your site to be in a bad neighbourhood. If your site receives lots of traffic you should consider getting a dedicated server, this would ensure this doesn’t happen and will speed up the site.

3. Use an Apache server for .htaccess
Google is still indexing websites using both the www address and the non www address, and Apache servers offer the simplest way to fix this by editing the .htaccess file. This file can also be used to change your unfriendly URLs to friendly URLs which will help your long tail listings in Google. Windows doe have an alternative called ISAPI re-write but its rarely available to use.

When changing servers be careful to make full back-up of your site including any databases. And remember it can take up to 48 hours for the new host to switch over.

Paul
SEO Project Manager