I recently had a very long and ultimately very dull meeting with an ecommerce company.
Amongst the topics that I was lectured about were SEO factors and how they effect on site rankings.
While I was trying not to glaze over or get distracted by the view from the window, it was suddenly mentioned that the hosting speed of your site has a big impact on how well it performs in the SE rankings.
From the information I was being presented with, it seems that the Google robots will spend more time on sites with faster hosting as they are able to crawl more pages in the same amount of time, when compared to crawling a site with slower hosting. In effect this company was saying, the more you can spend on your hosting the better your SEO results would be. HARD SELL HARD SELL!
Now it sounds plausible but this rang a warning bell for me, as I seemed to remember reading a Matt Cutts article, when Google first announced the release of Caffeine, about exactly this.
In fact, I seemed to remember Matt going to great lengths explaining that while Google did take hosting into account for some results, it would only effect a tiny amount of them. (About 1% in fact after digging about)
Lets hear from the man himself – “I want to pre-debunk another misconception, which is that this change will somehow help “big sites” who can affect to pay more for hosting. In my experience, small sites can often react and respond faster than large companies to changes on the web.”
So from my understanding, and I could be wrong, God know’s that happened before, it seems that what Matt is saying is that you can speed up your site in many ways, not just by pumping cold hard cash into the hosting solution. E.G. If you’re running a Word Press blog like this, make sure you use a well written theme (Thesis Thesis Thesis!), use widgets sparingly and take advantage of plugins like WP-Cache etc.
Once that’s taken care of, concentrate on making sure your content, keywords & title tags are relevant and any links are of the right sort from high ranking pages.
For a really good round up on what you need to look at SEO wise, check out this SEOMOZ page.
And while we’re at it, here’s the link to that Matt Cutts article too.
Of course this information has been about for a while, so it’s probably out of date or been superseded. So don’t take my word for it, do your own research.
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