Choosing an SEO Friendly Web Host
================================= As mentioned before, the more stable your site is the easier it is to be search engine optimize your Internet business. Here are some things to look for when choosing a web site hose.
Minimum Uptime
Your website’s minimum uptime is something that will determine whether or not people will 1) be able to access your site quickly 2) be able to access it whenever they want. The percentage figure that the web host claims describes as minimum uptime must be high or your web site will be slow and unreliable.
You can find this percentage somewhere in the web host’s lists of statistics or features. This figure describes the percentage of time that your web site will actually be ONLINE. This figure should 99.5% or higher!
If they don't provide this kind of information upfront or seem to be burying it, then it is an indication that the site might suffer from a lot of downtime. This not only costs you time and customers, but also such a site is not even worth the time spent on search engine optimization.
Plenty of Bandwidth
Bandwidth (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic") is the amount of bytes that are transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site per day.
The first thing that you need to know is that there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Don't believe any commercial web host that advertises itself as offering "unlimited bandwidth". The host has to pay for the use of the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, most will simply just charge you for the extra amount that you use. Many startup sites that require high bandwidth have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive a lot of hits and end up with deductions on their credit.
The reason this is important is because your web site can actually start to cost you if your search engine optimization techniques are working and you receive a lot of hits. The idea is to find a website that will not charge you outrageous usage fees if you do end up using more bandwidth then they initially thought. As most websites fail as moneymakers most web hosts are not counting on you becoming so successful that you hog their entire cyberspace. However if you do, watch out as exorbitant fees are often hidden in the fine print of the contracts that they have with you.
To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives use less than 3GB of bandwidth per month. If you plan to use more space, then buy more space.
If you are performing SEO techniques on your website it is almost guaranteed that your traffic requirements will grow over time. This is a natural side effect of your site becoming better known. CHECK THE FINE PRINT of the web hosts Term of Agreement policy to see if they will charge you any extra if your site uses too much bandwidth.
Subdomains
The best free hosting services do not charge you extra for adding anywhere from ten to twenty subdomains. For those of you not familiar with subdomains, it allows you to customize a page and give it a different URL. This can be useful when it comes to adding search engine optimized content to your site.
For instance, let's just say that you are the owner of www.fishinglureearrings.com. However an individual from another site has sent you an excellent article about earrings made from feathers that is brilliantly optimized with searchable keywords and you want to post it on your web site so that it can draw more traffic to your site. In this case you would want to create a page called www.fishinglureearings/feathers.com so that the search engines easily find the niche material.
Customizing an entire page like this is a good way to keep your web site fresh and lively for your readers. When the search engines see fresh material like this they are also more encouraged to crawl the page and index it on their search engine pages. This of course improves your overall search engine ranking as well as the number of potential buying customers to your website.
