Many people wonder if choosing local will affect how your website will rank in the search engines. Keep in mind that no matter what company you choose to host your site, it will affect the rankings. That is why it is important to choose the right one.
Local Web Hosting
When you search for something in a specific area, it will show you results from close by. That is why you might decide to host locally. Search Engines will utilize the location of a site to determine if it should be displayed in certain searches. For example, if you are looking for something that is based in the United Kingdom, the search engine would provide you with sites that are based in that area.
Search engines will use several things to determine the location of a website. They will use the IP address of the site. This is the address that will be assigned based on the location and sever you are on. This means that if you would have a hosting provider in the United Kingdom, your site would rank higher than if your website was in a surrounding area.
The downfall to hosting locally would mean that your site may not appear as high in the search rankings when searched by in other countries. For example, if someone in the United States searches the same keywords as the person in the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom search ranking would list your website higher than in the United States. Hosting for UK will make your site rank higher. With that being said, there are also a few other factors to consider as well when choosing a web hosting company.
Uptime/Downtime
The downtime is the time that the website cannot be accessed due to problems with the host’s server. There are search engine spiders that will visit sites to see if they can be accessed. If these spiders visit your site during the downtime, they will move onto the next site and rank yours lower. The more that this happens, the more your site becomes flagged. This means that your ranking will go lower each time.
Speed
One factor that will affect your rankings is how long it takes your page to load. If your page takes longer to load it will not appear at the top of the search. You need to make sure that your web loading speed will be quick with the host. When a website takes longer to load, it is considered unreliable. This means that it will also not appear as high in the rankings.
Conclusion
No matter what company you choose, your host will determine the rankings. That is why you want to make sure that your host is reliable. They should not have much downtime and the loading speed should be excellent. Keep in mind that when you host locally your search rankings will be higher for the local area, however, they could be lower for other areas.
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