One of the most frequently overlooked aspects of SEO today is the combination of domain and hosting. Google’s Panda update took some of the emphasis away from links and meta data, pushing it instead onto quality content and social networking. With this new focus, people forget that the domain and the host can still have a huge impact on SEO.
The Importance of a Good Domain:
A solid domain name is a very personal choice for a business. It might be the name of your business. It might be related to your keyword. It might be an acronym about your industry. In the past, the best strategy was to buy the domain of the keyword you targeted. For example, www.NorfolkElectricBikes.com would be a better domain to own than www.WantToGoFast.com or www.BikesForYou.com. Both of these options are more generic, and thus draw fewer hits and conversions. A good read for you How to Turn a Domain Name into a Brand?
Today, there are several issues with this strategy. First, Google has diminished the effect of an exact match keyword domain, so they are less effective than they used to be. However, they still can garnish higher click through rates in the search results compared with the competition. Second, many of the high traffic keyword domains have been purchased already. To find an exact match, you might have to stray into .org, .net or .info territory, further diminishing the effectiveness of the name. Third, the primary .com domains have high competition, meaning they are very expensive if you want to purchase them from a reseller.
The best domain to choose today is one that matches your brand. Short, unique and authoritative domains that can build into a strong brand are the most effective. For example, www.mashable.com is not a highly sought-after keyword, but it has become a large brand, well known brand. These sorts of domains are not generic sounding, nor are they long-tail keywords in the URL form designed purely for SEO purposes.
Choosing a Quality Web Host:
Once you have your domain, you need hosting for your site. The design of your site is important, but what happens if it takes ages to load? If a user searches for something, they are interested in finding results and most want results quickly. When they click a search result and the page takes more than a second or two to load, most users click the back button right away. Responsive hosting is important for PC users, and even more so for mobile users. Mobile Internet is often slower than home or business Internet systems. Any slowdown in PC browsing will be even more noticeable in mobile browsing.
Speed issues aren’t always caused by your host, of course. In fact, poor coding and bad scripting on your site cause most speed issues. For a perfectly designed site, however, a poor web host can cause issues.
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Your choice of host also affects your uptime/downtime levels. For a business site, you need as close to 100 percent uptime as possible. Any downtime can coincide with a user visiting or a search engine indexing your site. At best, this turns away a visitor. At worst, Google may see a broken site and demote it accordingly.
Server location is of minor importance for SEO, but that importance increases for local geo-targeting. If your business is located in Europe, and your site caters to visitors in Europe, you might as well attempt to host your website on servers in a secure and efficient location. This increases speed, because data does not have to be sent across several data bases or from remote data farms. It also has a minor affect on search ranking, in that a local site is more likely to have local information than a remote site. Again, this is a minor bonus, but it can be the difference between the number one and number two spots on Google in a hotly contested niche.
There is one more issue with poor hosting, though in recent years it has mostly dropped away. Some web hosts will advertise themselves as cheap hosting, and will impose limits on you in exchange for the low price. They may include a clause in your terms of service stating that you are not allowed to use the web hosting for business and only for personal websites with lower traffic. They may append their domain to your URL. Some will even demand that you allow them to place ads on your site. All of these are ways to kill your site ranking, so you should avoid cheap and free web hosts at all costs.
For the best SEO effect, combine a good, high quality brand domain with solid business web hosting.
