Website hosting might be an important aspect that can have effect on your website ranking on search engine ranking and also on various other factors. Let us take a look at some of the key points to be considered about the host provider, while hosting your website.                          

Web Hosting and Clean Records

The host should have a good record at Google. Although, there is no formula to rate them, web hosts that are very prominent and highly used could be trusted rather than the unpopular web hosts.

Virtual shared IP is a system by which a web server uses the same IP address for different domains. Instead of having a new machine for a server, a number of multiple virtual servers are made to reside on a single computer. Some web hosts can host up to 2000 domains on a single IP address; it all depends on the processing capability and available resources of/for the server and the quality of service that the host abide to provide to its all clients. In this case the web pages feed to the search engines would be very slow. However these days virtual shared hosting is a common scenario for being reliable and cheap option and accepted by search engines especially Google. Google does not ban sites by virtue of their sharing an IP address with a misleading site.

Intelligent Domain Selection

Domain name selection should be very intelligent and wise, if your website has to serve local market. For example, if your services are aimed for limited people in the UK then a .uk domain is preferable. If the website is intended for a global market, then a top level domain of .com is preferred. Domain selection will directly affect the ranking of your website at Google. In the above example, if a UK shoe company has a .uk domain, it would rank higher for UK shoes search. If the UK shoe company had a .com domain, it would be in the competition for general search terms from all over the world, not just for the local market.

URL Restructuring

Maintaining the proper structure of your URL is also important. Search engines have problems while indexing dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are those having many parameters or long query strings. Google is considered to be happy only with one or two parameters. The more parameters the more difficult it is to index them. Try to convert your dynamic pages to static ones, or let the server do it for you the other way to reduce the number of parameters passed and thus assisting the spiders’ job of indexing.

Apache is the most popular web server and employs a special “rewrite” module that allows you to convert the dynamic long URL’s to search engine friendly web addresses, this module (mod rewrite) is not installed by default on the server. Many hosting companies offer it. Once it is installed it can convert the following dynamic URL

The new URL generated by the server is more SEO friendly and much desired by crawlers. Ensure that your host has this module working to enjoy the benefits.

Also Read: Make visitors land on your best content

Conclusion                                 

Hosting should not be a point of concern for your website. Depending upon your experience and technical know-how, you may benefit from going with the most popular hosting services, even if they are a little more expensive, rather than going for the best deal of a host with no reputation. If Google has a problem with your host then you will most likely have problems with Google. In most probable ways, to have an individual IP address is preferable so as to minimize the risk of index removal. Getting an advice from the expert can save your time and money, on the other hand experience can be a great teacher. 

The sites hosted on free or cheap web hosts aren’t expected to get high rank at Google for most of the competitive keywords because of the sure reason that free sites are mostly prone to depleted content. In short, you must identify with your web host and get aware of all issues before selection. These some check points can make you safe for your further plans towards search engine optimization.

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