If you want your website to be successful, it needs to attract visitors. While you can do this through online ads, emails and social media, the most effective and cost-efficient way to drive traffic is to perform well in search engine results. The established way to do this is through search engine optimisation (SEO), a process that involves optimising your website and its content to improve ranking. What not everyone is aware of, however, is that some hosting solutions are built with SEO in mind and in this post, we look at their essential features.
Why SEO is important
Search engines are vital in helping websites get visitors. Over 91% of all searches are carried out on Google, a staggering 8.5 billion every day, according to SEMrush, making it the source of 66% of all web traffic referrals . That’s twice as many as all other sources of internet traffic put together.
These statistics have two vital implications for website owners. First, if you want to get found online, you need to get found on Google, and second, if you want to rank highly in Google search results, you’ll need to implement SEO.
New to SEO? Read SEO – What is it and Why Does Your Website Need It?
How web hosting helps with SEO
Search engines like Google use highly complex algorithms to rank web pages in search results. These algorithms are programmed to provide searchers with the most relevant results for their search query. While the search engine providers do not tell us how their algorithms do the ranking, they make no secret about some of the criteria they use for placing some web pages above others. According to Backlinko, there are over 200 Google criteria, though only Google itself knows the precise weighting of each one.
The relevance for web hosting here is that some web hosts provide infrastructure, services and tools that help websites meet those criteria and, in doing so, improve SEO and help them rank better.
One very important ranking criterion is site speed. In order to provide their users with better experiences, search engines want the sites they rank to load quickly. Google is so obsessed with this, that it has categorised the different loading criteria under the title Core Web Vitals and given them rather bizarre names like ‘largest contentful paint’ and ‘cumulative layout shift.’ The importance for websites here is that choosing a web host and a hosting solution that makes your website faster can help improve SEO. Hosts that use modern, high-performance hardware, like Intel Xeon processors, NVMe SSD drives and DDR4 RAM can deliver faster loading times than hosts using older technologies. Similarly, upgrading from shared hosting to more powerful solutions like VPS, dedicated server and cloud can also dramatically boost speed.
These are not the only measures that good web hosts employ to improve speed. They will also make use of caching and content delivery networks, offer faster PHP versions and use protocols like HTTP/2. Moreover, they will optimise server software, like Apache and NGINX, and deploy operating systems like CloudLinux that enable them to better manage shared hosting plans so that resources are fairly allocated, and individual users do not have their site speed affected by the operations of other sites on the shared server.
For more information, read: How Website Loading Times Impact User Experience and Hosting Choices
One of the last things search engines will wish to do is send their users to non-secure websites where they are at risk of infection, hacking or fraud. For this reason, a number of ranking criteria are linked to website security. Web hosting can help improve security in numerous ways, for instance, hosts can provide users with SSL certificates that encrypt data that travels between a user’s browser and the server, preventing personal and financial information from being intercepted en route. They also use firewalls and intrusion and infection prevention tools to defend websites from hacking and malware that can impact their ranking ability. They are also able to monitor whether the IP addresses assigned to their customers have been blacklisted so that actions can be taken to address these kinds of issues.
Essential SEO tools
While web hosts can help SEO with site speed and security, there are many other aspects of SEO that website owners need to put in place to improve their ranking, including site auditing, keyword optimisation and competitor analysis. This can be an ongoing, arduous and occasionally technically challenging process that many owners have difficulty keeping up with.
Good web hosting providers will know the importance of SEO to their customers and will offer highly effective tools to make the process far easier. eukhost’s All-In-One SEO Tool, for instance, provides customers with a full suite of services to boost their search engine performance. It starts by analysing their site and provides users with a detailed report identifying any issues with SEO. In doing so, it addresses on-page analysis, backlinks, keyword ranking, mobile-friendliness, website speed and more. What’s more, it even produces a personalised plan of action that prioritises the different tasks needed to improve your SEO, together with step-by-step instructions on how to implement the measures required, making it easier for SEO beginners and veterans alike. It also helps you track your progress as you move forward, giving you access to real-time data. You can even link the tool with your Google Analytics account to provide more accurate insights. In addition, the tool also enables you to track your competitors, letting you monitor the popularity of their websites and see how well they rank for the keywords you are pursuing.
As a result of using the tool, companies can improve their SEO without having to invest too much time and effort into the process as much of the hard work is automated. It can also save users on the cost of using a third-party SEO agency.
For more information, read: 6 SEO Mistakes and the SEO Tools to Avoid Them
Conclusion
With two-thirds of all internet referrals coming from Google, website owners cannot afford to ignore SEO if they want to drive organic traffic to their website and grow their visitor numbers. A good web host plays an essential role in helping websites meet some of the most important search engine ranking criteria, including site speed and security. In addition, they can also provide state-of-the-art tools that make it easier for owners to understand what SEO development their websites need, and which help them put this into place and track progress. This kind of input clearly shows why it is vital to choose a hosting provider with SEO in mind.
Struggling to rank in search engine results? Get the high-speed performance and security you need from a hosting provider, make your SEO journey easy with our All-In-One SEO tool and get expert help finding the right solution for your needs. Find out more about all our hosting services by visiting our homepage.
