How Can Web Hosting Affect SEO?

When you consider SEO strategy for your website, web hosting is not likely to be a factor. Yet there are subtle ways that it can affect your search engine rankings — especially when you are switching to a new web hosting company.

It has probably taken you some time to achieve your rankings, so you’ll want to make sure that you don’t have to start from the beginning simply because you have a new web host. Luckily, you can change web hosting providers without any SEO impact by following a few simple steps:

Keep Your Domain Name

If you registered a domain name for your website, you should be able to move it to your new website by using the DNS provided by your new provider. This is an essential part of changing web hosts — without your domain name, you’ll be forced to wait for your new site to be read and indexed by the search engines. Also remember that your domain name is your online identity — which can be even more difficult to recreate.

Don’t alter URL structures

Think about your website as a whole — it’s not just your home page that the engines index, it’s every page of your website (and its corresponding URL).By keeping you URL structure the same when you move your site to a new web hosting company, you’ll be able to retain your rankings and the valuable inbound links that affect the search algorithm.

Pick a reliable provider

You must do your research before choosing a reliable web hosting company. Look for online reviews of your candidates and focus on those that offer an uptime quote of 99.99%. Hosting uptime is an important component of your search engine success. When the search engines arrive to crawl your website’s content and find that your site is down, it doesn’t bode well for your rankings.

Switching to a new web hosting company can be done without any harm to your search engine rankings if you follow these simple recommendations.