Your business’s fight for prominence doesn’t start with analytics or keywords but goes back to selecting a hosting company and picking your domain. The online market place is growing, and every business wants its website/ eCommerce store to display on the first page of Google and other search engines. The modern digital world is all about SEO (search engine optimization)

Page speed of the website

The websites which are quick and responsive are more likely to scale on the search rankings; websites with low load time impact your user experience. It’s a fact that if a website takes more than two seconds to load, visitors are more likely to move onto the next possible option. Choosing a good web host is critical because a good web host decreases a web site’s load time with the help of the latest caching technologies that result in a high volume of traffic. Remember, reduced load time means more web views.

Another very critical aspect that determines the page speed of your website is the location of the hosting server. For instance, if you are an Indian company, a hosting server located in Bangalore might add to more speed than a hosting server located in California, USA. Apart from selecting a local server, it is also very crucial to carefully check which local hosting services can give you the optimum speed at lower costs.

The relevance of keywords and a seamless experience on the website

For getting visitors from search results to your website, keywords play an essential role. The period your website is inaccessible because of the problem with the server it’s hosted on. A good hosting server has very good uptime, usually 99.9%, and the maintenance work often happens late at night, especially as per your country’s time zone. Search engine spiders visit websites several times a day, if they visit during the period of downtime, since selecting a good hosting server will benefit you as your website does not have any network outage or goes down during the peak shopping time. It is also is essential to keep in mind that search engines don’t display websites highly on their result pages as it reflects poorly on them if they click on a website, and it’s inaccessible.

Also read: Power of content: How to generate traffic to your eStore using content

Secure

We all want security when it comes to online shopping, imagine sharing your credit card details over a non-secured e-store and finding out later that you have been phished. A phishing website tries to steal your account password or other confidential information by tricking you into believing you're on a legitimate website. Trust is huge in the digital world. 

Hence, to build up to your customer’s trust: SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is a type of digital certificate that provides authentication for the website. Credit card transactions, data transfer, and logins are secured with the SSL certificate. SSL certificate is an excellent way to add trust to your website.

Hosting plan

Web hosting allows organisations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. Depending on how heavy your site is, you can go for Shared, Dedicated, and VPS type of servers. Having a heavy site on shared hosting might impact your overall page speed, which, again, is not good for your SEO was mentioned above. Hence for high traffic websites, it is recommended to go for an option with higher bandwidth, so going for a dedicated server would be ideal.

Domain age, and authority

The age of your domain, and its capability to acquire pertinent domain metrics, is critical. The domain metrics measure the number of URLs that have links directing to your website, the authority of any referring domains, how trustworthy the site may be, and so on. The older the domain, the higher your domain authority.

Domain authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). The domain authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with one being the worst and 100 being the best. 

Domain name

It’s always a  good idea to stick to shorter domain names, which gives a gist of what your business is about. Imagine you have your clothing brand ‘abcclothingstores,’ and your website’s name is ‘abcclothingstorez3.com’, and if you say it out loud, it will be difficult to explain the ‘s’ or ‘z’ in store. It’s advisable to stay away from domain names that include numbers, use unusual spelling, or are longer than about 15 characters. 

The key to an SEO friendly domain and hosting server is to meet your visitor’s expectations and keep it as simple as possible. Now that we have established why the domain or hosting services are so important for SEO. It is always advisable to go for a local domain registrar.

Also read: How to have the perfect mix of a phygital (physical + digital) store?

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