If you’ve been following our site for some time, you’ve probably seen us talk a lot about search engine optimisation. If you missed it, check out our page on the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) here.

For those of you who aren’t already familiar with SEO, this is essentially the process of getting your website to rank as one of the first search results in search engines for keywords and search terms relevant to your business.

There are several SEO techniques that you can use to improve your search engine rankings, and get your site ranking higher in search results. For example, you can:

• Ensure your website is secure, accessible, easy to navigate, and fast loading (as all of these things will help you to offer the best possible user experience)
• Ensure your site is optimised for mobile, as well as desktop
• Choose a good domain name that can be easily indexed by search engines
• Publish high-quality content that has been optimised with relevant keywords
• Use keyword-rich page headings, meta descriptions, and URLs
• Use a combination of inbound, outbound, and internal link building
• Build your domain authority
• Grow your social media following
• Take out paid advertising to ensure your website is displayed at the top of relevant search engine results

However, there is one other thing that affects your website’s SEO that we have not really touched on much yet – and that is your website hosting.

Essentially, website hosting provides you with space for your website and its content to be stored securely online. This space is rented or purchased from a server owned by a web hosting company. Once your website has been saved onto this server, people will then be able to access it from their browsers.

A variety of different hosting services exist. However, it is important to note that these can vary significantly in terms of their reliability, loading speed, and uptime (i.e. how long the server is online for before shutting down, restarting, or going offline for another reason).

Choosing a reliable hosting service is one of the best ways to support your SEO efforts and improve your Google ranking. Hosting your website on its own high-quality, dedicated server will ensure fast website speeds and minimal downtime.

Opting for a locally hosted server will also help with this, as the closer your server is to your target audience, the faster your page loading speed will be.

By comparison, lower-quality, less reliable hosting services will typically be less reliable. For example, they may experience longer periods of server downtime, which may make your website offline and inaccessible to visitors for a prolonged period. This has a negative impact on your website’s overall performance, as well as its SEO ranking.

Websites hosted on these lower-quality servers may also experience more database connection issues.

They may also have slower loading times. This will mean that your website is slower, and will take a longer time to load.

Given that nearly half of all web users will abandon a site if it takes longer than six seconds to lose, this could cause you to be missing out on a lot of potential traffic. This will also negatively impact your SEO efforts.

A lot of lower-quality servers will also use shared hosting. This means that multiple websites are hosted on the same server. Although opting to host your website on a shared server can seem more cost-effective, shared web hosting is typically less reliable and takes longer to load. 

As you can see, web hosting can have a big impact on your SEO success as a small business.

Web hosting is just one of the services we offer at Tomedia. Our high-quality servers are Australia based and highly reliable, with fast page loading times.

Choosing a good quality server like Tomedia’s will keep your website online and accessible. This is one of the best ways to improve your site’s SEO performance over time. You can find out more about our hosting and SEO services by clicking the links.