Website Hosting Shares a Secret Relationship with SEO

A Word on SEO

Marketers stay on a never-ending exploration of finding ways to improve the SEO of their website. Search engine optimization aka SEO is aimed at increasing traffic of a website or webpage by improving its visibility naturally, without having to pay money. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have top search engine results page or SERPs wherein websites are ranked according to some factors. Google claims to use about 200 signals to rank pages organically. These ranking signals have never been revealed by Google. SEO experts, yet, have figured out and stored many tools and techniques in their arsenal which they employ to get the job done.

Asking questions like “why SEO?” is equivalent to asking “why to promote?” Website traffic is analogous to people visiting your virtual store or office, which is the sole aim of the entire SEO team in a business. You know the answer why! But expectations from SEO need to be checked. There are no simple answers to ‘how to get the website to rank 1’? But there are ways to change how the targeted search engines see you. How quick and well the pages load will surely contribute to the user’s experience. Google prefers that, it seeks websites that cause no delay in loading and make the user experience pleasant. Web hosting has several not-so-obvious impacts on the websites’ loading speed and eventually the user experience.

Revisiting Hosting

The activity of web hosting allows individuals and businesses to post their web pages or websites on the Internet, for that they usually go to a web hosting service provider which is another business that takes care of the services and technologies required for the web pages or websites to be accessed on the internet. They ‘host’ or store the websites on special computers called servers. When an internet user wishes to view your website, all they are supposed to do is type the URL aka the address of your website on the internet, so that your web browser can locate that website and deliver or download the website data through it onto your device.

There are different types of web hosting- shared web hosting, reseller web hosting, cloud web hosting, virtual private server hosting, dedicated server hosting, colocation web hosting, self-service web hosting, and managed WordPress hosting, etc. The type of hosting you will benefit the most from depends upon your budget, unique demands, and the features of that web hosting.

How Hosting Affects the SEO of Your Website

Localized Hosting

When a user types in the URL of your website, that request travels from your search engine all the way to the server where your website is hosted using a network of interconnected networks called the internet. The website’s data from the server is sent back via the most efficient and the fastest route over the internet. Although there are state-of-the-art fiber optics cables carrying data that enables data to travel at lightning-fast speed, transmission loss is undeniable. How much light (data) gets transmitted depends upon several factors- the type of glass used, purity of the glass material, quality of interfaces that are fused between the clad and the core, and the quality of the assembly and end finishing of the part. With the highest attainable speed, 10 milliseconds delay is caused for every 1000 kilometers. When you chose a host whose data centers are located geographically distant from the location where your website’s users are, to reach their computers data will be delayed, more milliseconds for every 1000 km! This may seem negligible but it is not. Take a look at some of the statistics-

A delay of a second in the loading of a web page leads to a 7% decrease in the conversion rate of an e-commerce website.

It takes only 3 seconds for 40% of all the website visitors to abandon your web page.

The research undertaken by the search engine Firefox states that an improvement of 2.2 seconds in the page loading speed will result in a 15% increase in the conversions.

Similarly, a study by Amazon revealed that a slowdown of a single second of a webpage could cost it USD 1.6 billion each year!

Search Engine giant Google found out that if it were to slow its search results by only four-tenths of a second, it could incur a loss of 8 million searches a day which also translates to a loss of many million online advertisements!

So, localized web hosting is an important thing to keep in mind for the purpose of SEO while choosing a web host. Your website will load faster when the data centers that host your website are geographically located nearer to the people who will be accessing the website. Latency is the term used to refer to the time taken by a server to respond after it received a request. Latency is naturally low in localized hosting.

Colocation Hosting and SEO

Website loading speed is a disclosed ranking factor, to take care of this fact in SEO is crucial. Shared hosting is relevant because of cost-effectiveness and customization that it offers but the speed of website loading on a shared web hosting is slow because many other websites are hosted on a single server competing for bandwidth. It has critical security issues too, both from outside and from the other parallel hosted websites.

In dedicated server hosting an entire server is leased to the user. You can make a switch to a dedicated server or a VPS which will solely host your website, giving you much a faster loading speed and relief from the security issues encountered in shared hosting. But these are naturally priced higher than the shared hosting.

In colocation hosting, you rent rack space for your server and other hardware, while the hosting provider takes care of the cooling, electricity, internet, and all the other needed infrastructure. This means that you have the freedom to bring your own hardware and software, you are in charge of the storage and backup procedures, etc. It is comparatively affordable and hence preferable for most website owners.

The question ‘which hosting to choose’ pertains to your particular demands as the website owner. But choosing a web hosting type and a web host that positively will affect SEO is a prudent decision.