There are many things to consider when diving into the world of SEO, such as; how to optimize your site and how to get those rankings? Beyond this, you also need to ask yourself how you plan to host your site. Now it seems that these two questions can be combined into a question of their own, can the web hosting service you choose impact on the SEO techniques that you are undertaking on your site?

Let’s look at this objectively, one might think that Google and other search engines will not judge you on hosting options, as that does not have relevance in terms of ranking factors. But, is that really the case?

Web hosting will surely effect SEO. If you are hosting on a service that often has downtime then your rankings can be affected. SEO is really a large system of connected factors, so it is important to get them all right. Messing up one can start to unravel everything. Often enough a free option is not best, because of the domain name and unreliable hosting. These problems can be minimized by using hosting systems that are reliable such as Hostgator and WebAfrica.

This leads you to think of the page speed, we know that search engines, Google included, take it into account. If you are using an unreliable hosting service with regular downtimes or without the capacity, resulting in your page speed being effected this can prove to be a real SEO problem

There is also the problem of spammers, if you have a shared hosting account, meaning you share space on a server along with other developers and you never know who those people are. In this case you share an IP address, and if it shows spammer activity then it could even result in your site being affected or even worse, banned.

If we want we can even look at the issue of indexed pages. Most owners would definitely want their sites to be indexed as quickly as possible, especially if they are focusing on their SEO. If you are a news site, or any information blog of sorts, this would be even more important to you. So what is the issue here? Well, many hosting services have drawbacks to this. Free hosting services will often offer sub-domains such as Blogger and WordPress, some will not even let you choose your domain name. With issues like this, these sites are often more slowly indexed. A possible reason for the slow indexation rate could be with that -whereas authoritative hosting sites have trust and are well known by search engines. Spiders will frequent these sites and be directed by the hosts to your sites quicker than usual.

The authority and trust of the host will have a positive effect on your site and added to this, you will know that with a good host you will not have to suffer the inconveniences that you can experience on smaller unreliable services. When it comes to SEO, there are often drawbacks to trying to take short cuts, and hosting is no different. Sure at first the cheaper or free option looks perfect and too good to be true, but more often than not, that is exactly the case. So if you want my advice, dip into the pocket and chose an option that won’t put a spanner in your SEO efforts

Cale Pissarra is an online content writer and enjoys writing about anything to do with technology. His current favorite topics consists out of web hosting, page speeds, SEO and domain registration techniques.