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Your SEO hosting checklist

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Not many businesses realise how much effect their web hosting company has on their site’s search engine optimisation. In fact, most site owners would assume that the ordinary hassles that a hosting company can cause, such as slow downloads and bad customer service, are mainly just an issue at the site level. Very few businesses suspect the deep impact these little inconveniences can have on their place in the search engine results pages.

Here are seven questions that are good to ask whenever you’re considering a hosting switch after you optimise your website:

Are they local? Having a hosting company that’s located across the other side of the world from your site can be a very bad thing, particularly when things go wrong. The technological side of the internet is good, but it’s not that good. It pays to check up on a company’s claims that they are Australia-based, especially if their hosting price is cheap.
Do they provide proper support? If your web hosting company doesn’t react swiftly in an emergency, they are ultimately of little use. A website needs to be able to recover from a crash swiftly in order to maintain its relationship with Google. Even a couple of days of being down for repair could cost you your ranking. You can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about website maintenance and how this affects search engine optimisation.
Do they offer enough bandwidth? The success of an SEO plan often means an increased strain on a site’s server as more traffic comes through. The worst possible situation is for you to work hard on your SEO, only to have your site fail when you succeed.
Is their system easy to access? If you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to access your control panel, you’ll waste a lot of time. Remember, a good search engine optimisation plan is likely to require frequent content updates.
What’s their IP offer? Some hosting companies try to squeeze websites onto the same IP address, and this can cause significant problems for your site’s SEO.
Do they allow use of the technology you require? There are web hosting companies out there that place restrictions on the simplest of things. It always pays to check. Companies have got into trouble in the past by assuming that their web host allowed use of things like htaccess files.
Are they a reseller? Lots of web hosting companies these days are just resellers. The major problem that comes with buying from a reseller is that they don’t usually have physical access to their servers. If your site crashes, you want to know that the person on the other end of the phone can do a hard reboot.

Do your research
There are heaps of great forums out there with users who are all too willing to share their experiences with web hosts. Tap into these when checking out a new web hosting company. It can save you a lot of trouble in the long run.

Tags: content, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consult
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When to SEO; when to PPC

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising are two very different streams of marketing, and yet they’re often mentioned in the same sentence. Partly this is because they are seen as two different ways of getting the same effect, namely, more traffic to your website. Partly, the two forms of marketing are mentioned together because they can work well together.

Not every search engine optimisation campaign will benefit from PPC, but it can be a good idea to look into how PPC can affect SEO. Knowing the differences between the two forms of marketing, and knowing how they can be used together, can be helpful in those times when your traffic rate really needs a boost.

The main point brought up in discussions about PPC and SEO is that PPC clearly outstrips SEO in terms of speed. There is no doubt that optimisation takes time. Sometimes, this is time that a website does not have. As many site owners put off their SEO until traffic rates force them to take action, the weeks between optimisation and results can be a significant drawback. A PPC campaign can often be the answer.

Many companies struggle with the downsides of PPC, namely money and long-term results. While PPC results are fairly predictable and come in handy in the short term, they aren’t around to support a site in the long term like SEO does. PPC can also be more expensive than optimisation, depending on the size of your site and the industry you are in.

One factor that is often overlooked is that while PPC is a good way to get precision results, it does nothing for the health of your site itself. One of the major benefits of undergoing SEO is that it achieves a general site clean-up, and can enhance your presence on the net in general. Talk to our experts at SEO Consult Australia about the side benefits of SEO.

Most companies tend to opt to use a combination of PPC and SEO as a part of their online strategy, and this can work well. In many ways, PPC and SEO complement each other. PPC can provide a quick boost to a site’s traffic while you wait for optimisation to take effect. Pay-per-click can also be handy at the start of an SEO campaign as a method of testing keywords. With the speediness of results for PPC, and the ability to change back and forth as you desire, keyword testing becomes a very rapid process with PPC. Some companies use the knowledge they gain about keywords in early PPC campaigns to boost their SEO, with some success.

That said, SEO is something that can and does stand on its own. The general feeling in the marketing industry about optimisation is that it’s a basic foundation from which other campaigns can be launched, if necessary. If optimisation is performed early enough, additional ad campaigns will be unnecessary. The main thing needed is patience. Plan well for your SEO, and it may be all you need.

Tags: Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, search engine optimisation campaign, SEO, SEO Consult
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