Blogger BlogNet79880

Not so long ago, websites were commonly hosted by ISPs. Web hosting companies slowly emerged as the need to gain internet presence increase. These days, more and more people realized the need to have a website. This resulted in the emergence of cheap web hosting companies.

Cheap web hosting companies are basically newer companies who aim to win over the customers of older and bigger companies by lowering their prices. How can these new companies reduce their prices and still earn a profit? Cheap web hosting providers take advantage of the fact that servers, bandwidth and storage space are much cheaper these days than they were several years ago. Bigger and older hosting companies are aware of this fact too, but since they have a stable customer base they would not reduce their price as it would mean a slash on their gross income.

It is said that you get what you pay for. This is basically true in the web hosting industry. High end web host would naturally have more features...bigger disk space and bandwidth and back up service to all customers. While these are important features, not all website owners can fully utilize the bigger bandwidth and storage space. Moreover, costly backups are not needed by everyone but since they are included in the web hosting package, webmasters who have opted for expensive packages will have to pay for them. A cheap web hosting company would offer all the usual features needed by the webmaster but the backup would be an add-on feature that can be availed only if the client needs the service.

A lot of people would hesitate from signing in with a cheap web hosting company due to customer service support issues. It should be noted that this issue is also present in expensive web hosting companies. In most cases, cheap web hosting providers would offer excellent service as they would give more importance to customer retention.

HostingCoupons.org lists web hosting deals, discounts, savings and coupons from top web hosts. You will find the best of web hosting companies listed there including the top recommended hosts lunarpages and bluehost.

There are many articles and books that discuss the basics of Search Engine Optimization. As a result, we already know that Search Engine Optimization can be broken down into two parts, namely a) on-page optimization and b) off-page optimization.

On-Page optimization is concerned with page structure, choosing the right keywords and supporting words (for Latent Semantic Indexing purposes), placing these words and phrases in the right places and with the right density, optimizing the title tag, meta tags, alt tags, image names, and so on.

Off-Page optimization refers to tasks that are performed external to the web page. The most important task is often said to be getting a high Google PageRank (PR). To achieve this, a search engine optimizer will try to get as many links as possible from other sites (whose contents are relevant or related to the contents of the page to be linked to) that themselves have a high PR.

However, PR alone is not sufficient for off-page optimization. The text on the incoming links - the anchor text - is very important too. If anchor text does not support a search term, then it is possible for a lower PR page to rank higher than a high PR page, even if on-page optimization has been done for both pages.

Recently, though, I came across another factor that has an impact on search engine ranking. It is something that does not seem to be written about much. At least, I have not seen any book or web site that mentions it.

Impact of Hosting Location on Search Engine Ranking

It is often said that domain extension can affect search engine ranking. A domain name with a country extension (such as .co.uk or .net.my) tends to do well in that country's version of the major search engines, but not as well in the main search engines. Similarly, a domain that does not have a country extension will not do too well in that country.

But what about hosting location?

Our company is located in Malaysia. Our website used to be hosted in North America and we were getting some good rankings for many of our major keywords in the three major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. However, our site was not indexed by Yahoo Malaysia.

Then a few months ago, we relocated our website to a hosting provider in Malaysia.

Following the relocation, we noticed some major drops in ranking for pages from our site on Yahoo. For example, what was on the first page of Yahoo before the relocation dropped to about number 200 after the relocation. Our ranking on Google dropped slightly. Our ranking on Live Search did not seem affected.

Then we noticed something else: our site started to appear in the SERPs for searches on Yahoo Malaysia, and has been ranking very well since then. Our ranking on Google Malaysia has improved, and recently, our ranking on the main Google site has improved too.

This seems to indicate that Search Engine Optimization should take hosting location into consideration, since it can have an impact on ranking.

Obviously, we cannot come to conclusions based on a single example. However, for us, the result of the hosting relocation is real enough.

Copyright Ridzwan Abdul Rahman

The author owns Acdra sdn Bhd, a company in Malaysia whose main business is website development and search engine optimization