Search Engine Optimisation FAQs
Can search engine optimisation techniques be used on any website?
During the initial search engine optimisation assessment, Optillion will
review the client’s existing website hosting arrangements and investigate
any issues which may impede the implementation of the search engine optimisation
campaign. There are three main ways in which a website’s hosting arrangements
may adversely affect its search engine rankings.
Firstly, poor server uptime can have a detrimental effect on the ability
of a search engine to index a website. When a search engine spider visits
a web page, it does not attempt to follow all the links that it finds on
the page. Instead, it sends back to the search engine a list of the ‘linked
to’ URLs, which the search engine schedules to receive a visit by
a spider at a later date. If the spider subsequently visits one of the URLs
and receives a ‘page not found’ error message because the server
is down, it will have missed the opportunity to index any new or updated
content. If this pattern is repeated on a number of occasions, there is
a high probability that the page, and ultimately the entire site, will be
removed from the search engine’s index.
Secondly, the server location is an important factor in determining the ranking that a website will achieve in a search engine’s regional results. A UK business with a UK client base should ensure that its website is optimised to achieve high rankings in the search engine’s UK results. In order to be included in Google’s UK results set, a website must either be hosted on a server located in the UK or have a domain name which includes the appropriate country identifier e.g. .co.uk, .ltd.uk or .org.uk. There is evidence that having both UK hosting and a UK domain name provides an additional ranking boost in Google’s UK results. Although it is not always apparent from sales literature, many UK hosting companies actually host websites on servers based in the USA, where data centre and bandwidth costs are both considerably cheaper than in the UK.
Finally, problems occur if the integration of the domain name and the hosting package is not seamless. It does not matter if a domain name and website are hosted by different companies, but it is critical in such situations that the domain name and hosting are integrated at DNS/IP level. It is not practical to carry out search engine optimisation on a website if domain forwarding is used to associate a domain name with its web space - e.g. www.example.co.uk points to http://example.freeisp.com. In this situation the domain holding company effectively hides the underlying website from both visitors and search engine spiders, replacing it with a single front page which redirects visitors to the domain which actually holds the content pages of the website. The domain owner is not given full control over the content of the page carrying out the forwarding, which will be indexed by the search engines as the website’s home page. Any internal pages indexed by the search engine will be considered by it to be part of a separate website residing on the underlying domain.
