Content might be king, but search engine optimization is still incredibly important in this day and age. Ensuring search engines such as Google can find and crawl your website – and that they’re able to easily categorize what your site contains -remains essential if you’re going to maximize your chances on the highly-competitive modern web. It’s not surprising, then, that many hosts offer what’s known as SEO Hosting.
What exactly is it, though?
To put it in its simplest terms, organizations that offer SEO hosting grant clients multiple unique C-class IP addresses. These addresses can then be used to create a number of micro-websites that link to your primary website. By hosting a website across multiple IP ranges, name servers, and networks, you’ll be able to not only improve your site’s ranking but also more easily rank across a diverse geographical region.
This is primarily because most search engines use an IP address’s geographical location as a ranking signal. If your IP address is situated in the geographical location of the market you want to serve, you’ll likely rank higher than if it was hosted elsewhere.
Beyond that, SEO hosts also prioritize server stability and performance to a far greater extent than most other hosting companies. This is because they understand the importance of load times and accessibility to SEO. They also take care to keep their IP addresses pristine, ensuring there are no black marks within their address pool.
Some SEO hosts may also offer optimization services or access to a knowledge-base that can teach clients more about ranking their site.
SEO hosting is particularly valuable if you plan to host your website on a shared account. With traditional shared hosting, a single IP address is shared by multiple websites. That means that if one site owner engages in behavior that gets them blacklisted, everyone on that node will be penalized, as well. Not exactly ideal, right?
Optimization isn’t the only reason to tap into SEO hosting either, believe it or not. Some businesses, for example, may use their different IP addresses to serve differently-branded sites to their audience, ensuring they can appeal to a much larger market segment than what might otherwise be possible.
In short, SEO Hosting can be a valuable entry in your toolkit as a webmaster. It can help you avoid association with blacklisted domains, improve the ranking of your primary website, enhance local SEO, and enable you to reach markets that might otherwise be unreachable. Just be sure it’s not the only thing you’re doing to optimize your website.
Search engine optimization is a complex and involved process – your choice of host is only the first step, not the penultimate one.
