When you’re starting out, your main concern is to get your online business up-and-running quickly. You may be tempted to ask your friends to help you out, if they host their own sites. This can be a critical decision from an SEO marketing perspective.
What To Look For In A Host.
A huge number of website hosts exist. Some are free and some require a fee. As this is for your business, you don’t want to be looking at those free options. Leave the free options for websites involving family or friends or mini sites, but not for a full fledged business. There are too many limitations.
What kind of server do they have? This is where the information is kept. The server hosts the serving company’s websites. So, when somebody wants to look at a page in your website, the server makes this happen. The more powerful the server, the quicker the page appears to the visitor.
Apache is one of the best services. Apache is open source which means that it is free for web hosts. Also it supports a number of applications including content management systems and blogging platforms. If you use Joomla or WordPress, you are using an Apache-based server.
Free hosting servers often have a bandwidth issue. They won’t be able to upload files, videos, audios and the other Internet marketing tools used to increase their site’s saleability. You will be limited in what you can do. You do not want to be changing hosts after your site is established and running.
Why Is This So Important?
Search engine optimisation is quite complex. Your content will be optimised and will be distributed to various webpages. You don’t want to be limited in the number of web pages that you can create either. Each page represents a unique URL and a different keyword that you are focusing on.
You may be the one designing your website development or a website designer may be doing it for you. You don’t want to be limited by your platform as to what you can do. You may want to change templates at different times, to keep up with the way that you choose to conduct your business. The wrong web host can make it difficult to tweak templates to be more SEO friendly.
Also, with free hosting you probably won’t have full administrative control of your website development. For example, you may want to add files to stop spamming, to gather website statistics or put a web counter on a page. Just having enough access to edit content on your site is not enough.
When planning your online business, take time to really think about hosting and its impact on your future SEO. Choosing the right one can make all the difference.
Michelle Dale is Chief Executive of Virtual Miss Friday, an adept and highly-proficient Virtual Assistant Service which works closely with enterprising people who really want to succeed in their chosen field. If you’d like to learn more about online business building success strategies that are tailored to your needs, contact VMF today!