Search Engine Optimization or put in shorter terms SEO is a very discussed and at the same time not so clear topic. In this article, we will try to uncover basic knowledge to better understand how you can use it for your websites.
To make the main thing clear, we at WPX can be fully compatible with any website built through WordPress and want to have a good ranking and positive SEO impact.
What does SEO mean in terms of hosting a website?
To put it in simpler terms, every website you create on a hosting platform is on a specific server. The server provides the IP Address and Network that allows it to have its own DNS and space on the internet. Once the website is live and working with the correct records, it will start to appear in Search Engines such as Google Yahoo, Bing, etc.
That sums up the whole process of creating a website so it can go live and propagate through the internet and Search Engines to pick it up. Visitors are the key factor that defines how well your website is indexed amongst the rest which provides similar products, and content.
The tricky part comes with understanding how to leverage the tools you have to better your SEO ranking and position in search pages and indexing.
How can I use SEO to my advantage in shared hosting?
There are a few key factors that start from the beginning and that is, choosing the correct hosting platform for your website. The better conditions you have, the more it is likely that your business with enough effort and attention will grow in ranking.
The most important thing for any website owner and Search Engines is to have access to it at any given moment. That being said, Hosting Uptime Guarantee is a must when making a decision. You need to make sure that everything is covered by the hosting as much as possible.
Here at WPX, we offer 99.95% Guaranteed Uptime and additionally, independent hosting with our own sought-after servers which are not rented or second-hand used.
If you have a lot of downtime, that will gradually affect you over time in regards to your ranking and traffic going to the website.
Be sure to have a fail-safe plan B for anything that can happen in the future. Backups are extremely important and needed in case of failure of update, or messing up your layout while working on the website or in general.
We have taken notice of that importance and provide daily automatic backups for all the websites that are stored on a separate server and do not take part of your overall disk quota for any given plan.
The next key factor in line is Customer Support. You must have a good service and staff that you can contact at any given moment and get a quick answer or a technical fix whenever you stumble. The longer your website is returning an error or has an availability issue due to technicalities, the same logic applies to downtime and loss of potential traffic and rankings.
3. Create the best environment for your website to maximize SEO.
While the things we mentioned are important and depend on your choice of a hosting provider, there are a few more things that can be done for better SEO when your website is created.
One is to create a website sitemap. In short, that is a roadmap of all your links and pages, basically your entire structure. One is needed for the Search Engines and bots to easily access everything and populate it in the search rankings.
To create one automatically without the need for manual coding, use SEO Plugins which can provide you with the needed tools. A perfect example of that would be Yoast. Once you download and install it, it will automatically create and populate the entire website structure. More on the topic of setting it up can be read here.
Another good recommendation is to keep track of your ranking and make an overall statistic of your traffic. That can be done with a plugin as well which would automatically track and provide you with regular reports. You can use GA Google Analytics.
What can affect my rankings and SEO?
Sometimes there are a few things we need to be careful with when making changes on the website. They can negatively affect your SEO and impact your traffic on major browser engines.
One of those changes is Internal Website Redirects. If you plan on using multiple redirects from one page to another, separately added as code will affect your grade and ranking since the search engines use bots and want to have a direct line.
If the redirects are temporary or for maintenance purposes, you need to make sure that they are quickly removed once everything is done.
Another thing that can have an impact on your ranking is Domain Name Change. If you plan on migrating your content to a different domain, it can be done, however all of your links and structure will be different. Search Engine bots do not anticipate these changes, they are simply hitting the old links that are given and returning an error.
If you have any other questions on the topic, don’t hesitate to contact the WPX Support Team via live chat (use the bottom right-hand widget) and they will respond and help within 30 seconds or less.