Almost every company in today’s marketplace has a company website. Today, not only is a website important, but it is also important to have a cohesive company image across all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Yelp. Investing and building a company’s online presence through social media and blogs can take many months, if not years, to develop. Social media and blogs are great ways to get traffic to your website and engage potential customers, yet the main way to acquire even more traffic to your site is via search engines. The importance of a website being search engine friendly is crucial for increasing rankings within popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. While this may seem like a daunting task for a webmaster to undergo, taking small strides toward optimizing your website is the way to go. Before one gets overwhelmed with optimizing content and coding a website for search engines, start at the crux of a website; web hosting.
From an SEO perspective, it is important to ask yourself these questions about your web hosting company.
1. How reliable is my website?
This means, is your site periodically “down”? Any site outage you experience means your web hosting company is unreliable and your months of building an online reputation is lost, if only for a few moments. If Google bots were to crawl your site and the site was down even for a few moments, the Google bots takes note of that and Google can potentially penalize your website. A penalty from Google can result in lower rankings for an indefinite period of time. Lower rankings in Google results means less traffic to your site from search engines. Implementing a website monitoring tool, such as Montastic will help give the webmaster peace of mind that your site is up and running. If the site does go down, the webmaster receives an email alert.
2. How fast does your site load?
Google has explicitly stated in the webmaster blog that site load time is another factor within their rankings algorithm. Not only fast load time important for rankings, it is also important for user experience on your website. Studies show that the faster a website is, the longer a visitor will remain on your site. To find out about the speed of your website, use a tool such as Page Speed from Firefox.
3. How knowledgeable is your web hosting company with SEO?
If your web hosting company is knowledgeable about SEO and has great customer service, they will be contentious of site outages and load times. They will be sure to have minimal site outages and will ensure your website is loading quickly. It is also important to couple this SEO knowledge with great customer service so they will be there to address any concerns that may arise.
Myhosting is a leading worldwide provider of superior, affordable and reliable hosting services, such as windows hosting. With over 50,000 web hosting customers in over 170 countries, myhosting.com continues to demonstrate an extraordinary level of value and choice to their customers.
