Sometimes the factors that affect the SEO performance of your website aren’t always the most obvious. Many people engaging in SEO activities chase the acquisition of links or the development of their website’s content or the management of technical errors such as broken links. Quite often, there are serious issues hiding in plain sight and with a few fixes, the website’s SEO performance can be improved immensely.
The server performance is the underlying foundation for technical SEO. When this is implemented correctly, there is a huge opportunity to increase the crawlability of the site as well as the organic search visibility.
The following factors should be taken into consideration with your website’s server use and performance.
Ensure that you have a quick loading domain name server
The domain name hosting that your website uses will impact the lag time between a web users request to access the URL address and serving the content to the web user. If you run a quick test on Pingdom Tools, you will be able to see the wait time between the domain name hosting and your web server. If they are hosted by the same company, there shouldn’t be any lag. If they are hosted by two separate companies, then there is a chance that there is a lag time that will also affect the user experience on a website.
Shared hosting
For the most part, shared hosting is a cost-effective solution for getting your website on the internet. However, your website’s performance depends on the server space and bandwidth that is also being used by others on the same server. Should one of the sites get more traffic than expected, your site may experience downtime.
If you can afford dedicated hosting or a VPS server, then it would be a good solution to minimize the risk of server downtime.
CDN
To increase your website’s page loading time, you can utilize a CDN service such as Cloudflare to serve content quicker from different data centers around the world. The CDN will improve the user experience by allowing people to receive the information as soon as they request it. This should also minimize the website’s bounce rate.
Security
Website security is *extremely* important. Someone hacking into your website system or injecting malware can hamper your site’s SEO performance and reputation. Issues with your website’s security could cost you thousands of dollars. Find out the security measures that your web hosting company has to prevent the threat of malicious attacks to your website and the data that it holds.
Ease of website management
There are some web server consoles that are easier to manage than others. You don’t want to deal with an interface that is too complicated. Additionally, you want to have a host that allows you to make backups of your site easily and automatically.
The server supports SSL
Encryption is an important factor for security and is also an influencing factor for SEO. Check with your web host to see if you can include this with your package and what fees are involved.
Server log analysis
This is a process whereby the server logs are checked to see what the search engines are also seeing. You will be able to identify broken errors, redirections, server errors and crawling patterns from the server logs that you analyze.
You can use the details provided to make technical SEO changes to your site which should trigger a positive impact in SEO rankings within the following weeks. Review your current web server setup and identify where you can make changes that will improve your site’s SEO performance today
About the author: Nathan Elly is the branch manager for the SEO marketing agency Digital Next. When he isn’t busy doing marketing, you can find him playing futsal with his colleagues.
