Whether you are looking to create a business website, a personal blog, professional portfolio, a web-store or even a social networking site, you would require a domain name and a server to host your contents on. Depending on your needs and goals, you can choose from a spectrum of different web hosting types. Generally the hosting type you choose is decided by the amount of traffic your website would be generated and the performance you expect from it. But is the server location too an important parameter that should be considered?
Apart from creating a quality website, everyone wants their website to be search engine optimized to enhance the reach of an audience from a certain demographic. But if the location of the web server has a role, then it can be a different ball game altogether. So in this article we would find out whether or not the location of server plays a pivotal role in the website’s SEO.
How relevant is server location for your website’s SEO?
Earlier the server location used to play the partial role in the algorithm for local search results. But in the past few years, Google has the server location relevance to other targeting tools.
But depending on the type and quantity of the traffic you want to cater to, you can use distributed content delivery networks ( CDN) or host your servers in countries with better web server infrastructure. Apart from that the location of your server is not at all significant in predicting you website’s SEO health.
What possible web hosting settings can improve SEO?
There are different approaches by which you can ensure SEO website hosting, and the credit would mainly go to the various search engine targeting tools. So some of the best practices to improve SEO are as follows:
1- Country specific URLs – By using ccTLD (Country code top-level domain), your website would send a strong signal to the search engine, specifying the location where your website primarily caters to. If you opt for www.yourbusiness.ru, it would mean your website is inclined especially towards the audience of Russia.
Courtesy: megalytics.com
2- Google webmaster tools – Using Google’s Web Master tool or any other Geo Targeting tool, you can manually specify your target audience. All you need to do is select the primary location of your audience from the list of different countries. This feature alone makes the location of your web server irrelevant.
3- Site language – Language is one of the on-page items that signals the search engine about the focused target group. If your website’s content is in Spanish, has a generic top-level domain and target audience is not set in Web Master tools, then it is most likely to be rank well in Spain and Spanish speaking countries.
4- Other details – Phone number, currency and local address too has their effect on website SEO. If your website mentions or contains content that relates to a certain address, has mention of a specific currency or phone number, it is more prone to be picked up and rank well in that locale.
Apart from these, the physical or actual location of our server has no significance in deciding or emphasizing on your website’s SEO.
Thus in a nutshell we can state that, apart from the web server infrastructure, server location doesn’t have any other impact. It certainly isn’t relevant when it comes to SEO. If you want to improve your website’s SEO, you need to focus on your website’s content, and the type of language and information used in it. Also you need to account for country specific domain and make respective changes in Web Master Tools to create significant impact.
