Some website owners may not be able to distinguish between website SEO and website ranking or are not introduced to these terms at all. For what their website purpose is to provide them with a level of online visibility, and it serves the purpose.
You may hear the term “search engine optimization” either from a friend, colleague, or a competing business and you will be right to assume that it has an indirect influence on increasing your website profit, through traffic.
But what is SEO?
The SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website content for search engines in order to improve your website search ranking, by making it easier for search engine algorithms to digest the content and show it as a top result.
We can agree that SEO is a website content and marketing strategy that focuses on your site ranking in search results with search engines such as Google, Bing … etc.
The evolution of SEO and current relation with website hosting
The original state of the Internet now known as Web 1.0 provided internet users with content provided by the different websites, and search engines emerged as the best tool for searching through millions of websites. Back then some of the most popular search engines were Lycos, Excite, and Altavista.
As the Internet evolved so did the search engines, with some of them being “rebooted” at the start of Millennium (1999-200) which is the same time when Google was made.
Because websites were in most cases one or two pages and very little information so they could be loaded fast over modem devices (telephone line) with a speed of 9600 or 14400bps, the SEO of that time was to implement as many relevant keywords into these few pages as possible.
Then in 2002, when Google launched its AdWords service it was a moment many predicted SEO might as well be dead, as people could “pay the search engine” to get the number 1 website rank with search ranking.
This was not the case as search engines evolved, and now the relevance of a website search ranking included having links back to your website, while we can note that was the time a trend to buy links emerged, and some websites do that to this day.
Later, 2008-2010, as Google became the number one search engine, the improvements to SEO included avoiding bad SEO practices such as bad linking, link spamming because they now have a negative impact. Irrelevant linking was penalized and social media found their place in the SEO formula.
Today we must note that by Google SEO standards your website must be mobile-friendly, semantic search gives relevance to the content displayed and long-tail keywords, while for a best-case scenario your content should be optimized to provide a concise answer to a specific question.
Finally, a solid web hosting is a part of the modern website SEO formula, meaning you should choose your hosting provider well, or your SEO may suffer.
Web hosting impact on SEO
Relatively recently Google’s John Mueller has declared that their SEO algorithms will take website page loading speed into account, and any website page that is loading longer than 4 seconds will receive search ranking penalties.
Now, this does not translate into you having to overpay for website hosting, but it should mean that you need to choose a relatively solid web hosting AND also pay attention to the amount of media images, and other content as well as scripts running on every page of your website, as well as the overall website speed.
By limiting the amount of content presented per page you can alleviate the risk of having your SEO penalized by search engines, while we would recommend that you use Google PageSpeed Insights for an overall metric test of your website.
Conclusion
We can conclude that the main SEO change in recent years is that search engine optimization includes a metric measure of your website page loading speed, so the type of hosting as well as hosting resources that are available to your website do matter.
Our web hosting reviews and recommendations include overall web hosting speed metrics, which can help you with a comprehensive and discerning choice when choosing web hosting providers.