Below is the guest post by Raja. While the post won’t probably discover anything fundamentally new for you, I think it sums up nicely what we’ve been discussing lately about choosing web hosting, bad IP neighborhood, geo-targetting, etc.
Every web site has a host server at its base, and often the host company determines the success of your website or blog. The basis of all the great design and excellent content you publish on your website is to attract network traffic to it. The success and revenue generated by your portal is directly proportional to the number of users accessing it.
Search Engine Optimization is still one of the most prominent and effective ways of user traffic diverted to a new blog, and if the content on your blog is found interesting by the readers, you can be rest assured that your usage will totally sprout up and the popularity of the blog will rise.
Before you begin you must make sure to select an eminent hosting provider and package as it would have a direct relation to the work done by your SEO. Even the experts in Search Engine Optimization and will not be able to get respectable amount of traffic if the wrong hosting company is chosen. There are a large number of websites these days and it is a must to be a cut above the rest.
There are a number of factors that must be kept in mind while starting a new site or plan to work in the SEO industry, you’ll find them to be very helpful to read.
Geo – Targeting
To begin with the process of diverting traffic to a web site is actually easy but getting the right traffic that will help you make money is the hard part. You can have millions of page views and spend thousands on bandwidth expenses but this might also not help you generate big bucks. Just to cite an example we can say that a very popular site called Chat Roulette gets users from all over the world yet the owner is still not able to make any money as there is no single niche to the site and it is visited by many random people. There is a little income from random ad clicks but the click through rate is so low and not a good enough means.
You ought to choose the right hosting company preferably located in the right country if you want to jumpstart towards getting ample traffic. You begin your geo-targeting way from the country, then geo-target by region, state, county and city. Many of the online hosting companies have their servers in the United States, and since most web site owners and bloggers are targeting (i.e. selling or offering products) to Americans they don’t have to worry about webhosting. But there are a lot of site owners from UK, Spain, Germany and other countries whose sites are in their native languages and have their country’s top level domain (.co.uk, .es, .de, etc.) therefore they have to face disappointment that their name does not feature in top search engines like Google.
This is primarily because Google looks at the server, sees that it’s in the United States, and thinks that the owner of the site is targeting people in that country (which also has millions of people speaking English, Spanish and German). Plus, the page load time is higher in Europe and so if the server is in the US it would be beneficial. You need to remember to choose a hosting company in the country where most of your readers, and more importantly customers, are located. This is the main thing to be conscious of when choosing a hosting company for the best SEO results.
IP Addresses
This is another major factor in choosing a hosting company, or hosting package. IP addresses play an important role for your site’s SEO. Here the history of the IP address has an important role to play. If your IP address was used before by an owner of ant other site, who managed to make a name for himself. And if it was a good site, then everything is great, but if it had its name associated with any illegal activity like spam, phishing or anything else, Google and other search engines will definitely rank it lower and even be ban it from their index (in which case there is absolutely nothing you can do). You need to check your IP address for any infractions at Google (see if your site is indexed) and anti spam services like Spamhaus. If it’s all clean and clear, good for you and get ready to go.
Network Neighborhoods
Undoubtedly the neighborhood of your site is important for Search Engine Optimization. Although this is considered a very old feature and might even be obsolete in the in the near future but since you need a site ranked now, it would be a lot better to take it into consideration.
Just like when you choose a house, you want it to be in a good neighborhood free from crime and indecent activities happening. The same goes for your web site in the virtual world. If there are indecent sites on the same IP address as your site, they will affect your blog or website. In the worst case if the IP address is banned, your site will also lose the index.
There is not much freedom as you can’t choose who your neighbors will be, but going with a reputable hosting company that is strict when dealing with spammers and hackers will go a long way to ensure that your site is safe. The best thing to do is get your own dedicated IP address and then check for any infractions.
Service Reputation
This feature is as important in deciding the fate of a blog as the two mentioned above. You should vouch for a hosting company that has the best reputation and track record of dealing with infractions quickly and strictly. If you choose a company that knowingly hosts spammers, hackers and phishers or just pretends that it refrains from them, you are making a bad choice.
You should have a look at the reviews of the best hosting companies, thankfully there are a lot of them these days and you must go with the best one. It is not necessary that the costliest company may be the best as it is not the price/performance ratio that makes your SEO okay.
These are the necessary factors that come into play when it comes to choosing the best hosting provider that will aid your Search Engine Optimization efforts, and if you are successful in doing 90% of your work is done. Rest of the details can be ignored if you are running short of time but remember the more cautious you are initially the more successful web host you will be in the future.
About The Author: Raja maintains is a webmaster for the web hosting reviews site HostWisely.com. He regularly publishes interesting articles on web hosting, web development and latest hosting coupons. You can follow his updates @HostWisely.
