SEO is the most important factor that determines the success of any website. It is the process of optimizing a website so as to direct traffic to it from search engines in an organic way. The goal of SEO is to ensure that a website appears at the top of the first page of search engine results when related keywords are typed in.
While it is important that you optimize your website’s content for SEO, it is not the only factor that affects your website’s search engine ranking. The web host you choose also plays an important part. Following are the hosting aspects that decide your website’s rank:
Website Loading Speed
The loading speed of your website is the first factor that affects its user experience. People don’t like to wait for more than two seconds for websites to load. If your website has a higher loading speed than this, it can increase its bounce rate. This adversely affects the search engine ranking of your website as search engines prioritize websites that offer a seamless user experience. Consequently, the visibility and the amount of traffic to your website take a hit. You must choose a hosting service that offers your visitors a fast browsing experience.
Server Downtime
The percentage of your website server’s uptime is the percentage of time that it is active for without experiencing any crashes. The uptime must be as close to 100% as possible because when it is lower than that, people will see a “404 not found” error message when they visit your website and switch to your competitor’s website. This is another case of unsatisfactory user experience which results in Google lowering your website’s rank. And if the website’s downtime lasts for days, Google will delist or penalize it. The best hosting service will offer you a 99.99% uptime guarantee which means that your website will be down for only a few minutes per year.
SSL Certificate
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate encrypts the data that is sent from your visitor’s browser to your server. It ensures that this data is not accessed by hackers and other third parties. Google announced in 2014 that it would boost the rankings of websites that have the SSL certificate and use HTTPS to protect user privacy. If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate it will be marked as “not secure” and browsers will warn your visitors of a “potential risk” to their data security. This will force your visitors to abandon your website and cause them to lose trust in you. Choose a hosting company that provides you an SSL certificate.
Disk Space
Disk space is the amount of space that you get on a server to store your website’s data. Different web hosting companies offer different disk spaces. You must remember not to settle for less disk space just because a hosting plan is cheap. Less disk space can cause your website’s content to overflow and your website to crash, which is another factor that will turn your visitors away.
Regular Data Backups
Cybercrime is prevalent in today’s digital age. Almost every website is susceptible to hacking. When you fall victim to a cyber-attack you lose your website’s data, and your customers’ personal information gets leaked. Losing your work can also cause you to miss your deadlines. As a result, your brand’s reputation and customers’ trust takes a hit, and so does your search engine ranking. And this is where data backups come in. The right hosting plan can help you to recover your data quickly by performing regular backups and make sure that your ranking is intact.
Sharing Hosting Service With Spammers
Shared hosting is one that hosts multiple websites on a server. If you share the IP address with a spammy website, search engines will penalise you along with it. Shared hosting is an affordable yet unethical option that doesn’t help to improve your website’s speed or provide it security, and damages your reputation. A good hosting company will help you to avoid the company of spammy websites.
TLDs
A TLD or a Top-Level Domain is the part of a website’s domain that comes at the end after the dot, for example, .com, .net, or .org., and for specific countries, .co.uk, etc. .com is the most popular and hence the most memorable TLD. Using .com for your website can increase its visibility because when people look for a website, they tend to assume that .com is its TLD.
Mobile-Friendliness
Most people visit websites from their mobile devices today and Google prioritises websites that are optimised for mobile. It is important that your website is optimised for different kinds of mobile devices. You must make sure that your website loads quickly on mobile devices by optimising it for touch, making the content readable, and ensuring that images are of the right size and quality.
Revalsys is partnered with top data centers across the world for providing uninterrupted hosting service, be it for a small portal to large data-intensive deployments, helping you to host your application in a scalable, flexible, and secure hosting environment.
For more details visit https://www.revalsys.com/services/cloud-infrastructure.html or contact us at https://www.revalsys.com/contact-us.
