One area that many people neglect when looking for areas to try and tweak in order to improve their search engine rankings is their website hosting. With the search engines looking for more areas to try and use to calculate a websites ranking, it is important that you make sure you tick as many of the boxes as possible.

Your websites hosting can affect your online marketing efforts in many different ways, depending on the quality of the hosting that you already have.

Host Speed

As well as annoying customers, slow website hosting can now harm your search engine rankings. Google has already made changes to their search algorithms to incorporate the load speed of a website. If your site is constantly running slow, the search engines will lower your rankings, in order to show the fastest and most relevant sites first. A slow host can also annoy visitors and seriously harm your websites conversion rate.

Host Uptime

As well as the speed of the host, if there are problems with the host having a poor uptime record, this could start to harm your rankings. If the search engine spiders are not able to access the website, they can’t spider the site. If this happens on a regular basis, your websites rankings will start to drop, or disappear totally. Again, if a visitor tries to visit the site and can’t access it, it will not leave a good impression. If you are using any sort of Pay Per Click campaign such as Google AdWords, you could be wasting money.

Host Location

The search engines may use the location of the server that your website is hosted on to adjust your rankings within certain countries. For example, if your website is hosted in the UK, provided everything else is equal, it will rank higher than a website that is hosted in the USA or outside of the UK. The location of the server will also have an effect on the speed of the host.

Obviously, if you are spending any money on online marketing, it is worth spending a little extra on your websites hosting to ensure that it is not having any adverse effects on rankings or on the experience that your visitors have while visiting your website. That doesn’t mean that you need top spec hosting for your website, it just means that rather than settling for a budget website host, you should shop around and find a high quality host which has proven results.

The author has helped many companies with their online marketing campaigns, including search engine optimisation and email marketing.