There’s one thing that’s probably about the last thing that we think about when we consider search engine optimization (SEO) for our web sites.

But it is no longer the last thing that we should be doing. As a matter of fact, it’s becoming more and more important, every day. That one thing is exactly what I’m talking about today, on Episode 67, of the SEO and more podcast.

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There’s one thing, like I mentioned, that we really don’t think about when it comes to marketing and doing SEO on our websites and that one thing is hosting. Seriously, hosting.

Think about the last time you hosted a party, what did you wear? Was it business-formal or business casual? What kind of food did you have?

Of course, I’m not talking about hosting a party. What I’m talking about is web hosting. Where is your website located? Do you have a Wix website? Maybe it’s Square Pages. Maybe you have a custom website on custom hosting.

And what’s the difference between them? That’s exactly what I’m going to talk about today and why. I’ve talked about this before. Go back 10-15 years, I would have told my clients never in 10 years would you want a WordPress website. Because 10 years ago, WordPress did not work well with search engines; It just didn’t.

I could do a custom HTML website and get it on top of Google, Yahoo, Bing, whichever 110 times faster than a WordPress website and 100 times easier. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t any WordPress websites on page one of Google for keywords, but they were very few and far between. And the people who were trying to get WordPress site onto page one spent a huge amount of time doing it. It simply wasn’t worth it.

Things have changed a great deal from a few years ago. WordPress made some major changes. WordPress and most of the major themes are extremely SEO friendly now. I’d say it’s 90 to 95% as effective as custom HTML. So why do people do WordPress versus custom HTML? Custom HTML is so much more difficult to do. You might spend $1,500, doing a WordPress website. And at the same time, you’d be spending $8000-$9000 to do the same website using custom HTML. It’s just not worth it to do custom HTML sites anymore. That’s why 70% of the internet is WordPress. But maybe you don’t have WordPress, maybe you have a Wix website, or Square Pages. See Wix and Square Pages are like WordPress was about 10 years ago. The websites can look amazing.

I’ve seen Square Pages websites that I didn’t think Square Pages could do. They were amazing websites, but they still would have a very difficult time of getting very high in the search engines, simply because the back end Square Pages code; and Wix is like this as well. You can’t change that, you can’t manipulate it. So there’s errors in that coding that you can’t fix. And if you can’t fix it, the search engines are going to have a much more difficult time indexing that site.

That’s why we recommend WordPress so much.

No, I don’t recommend you going to wordpress.com and hosting it there. And again, this might change but right now wordpress.com has some pretty slow servers. That’s where the real question about hosting comes in because Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, all of the major search engines are starting to rank how high a website gets into search engines by how fast it loads.

That’s right, if your website looks beautiful, and people love it, but it loads slow, you could rank lower than your competitors. It’s that important. I’ve been doing a lot of research the last couple of months on this, and I’ve actually found out that I’m going to guess 60 to 85% of the websites let’s let’s use a scale of one to 1 to 100, meaning 1 is slower than a slug, 100 is faster than a rabbit, or a cheetah, whichever you choose.

The average website right now ranks about 45, unless you have a video on your website. If you have a video on the front page, you’re going to drop down to about 19 or 20. That’s terrible, which means the websites that even ranked 60 to 80 are going to be higher in the search engines than the average.

If you can get your web page speed to 90 – 100, you’re going to blow people away.

Yes, that does mean sacrificing some imagery, or maybe just some quality to the imagery. But a large part of that could simply be the company that you’re hosting with. Wix servers may be old. Square Pages servers may be old also, they may be hosting on an old server simply because it’s free. There’s no incentive for them to put your free website onto a faster server, which is why I recommend going to Koolwebhosting.com. Yes, that’s our hosting, that is fast hosting. You can go with one of the options that has higher monthly fees, which is around $15 a month. It’s not expensive.

I mean, that’s some seriously cheap SEO, isn’t it?

But if that makes your website faster, that’s worth it right there. You can do WordPress hosting there, but I highly recommend at koolwebhosting.com to do the cPanel hosting. There are a lot of places that do cPanel hosting, but you want places that have the faster servers and the faster connections. Koolwebhosting.com has very fast connections,

I have websites that rank 90 to 100 that are on those servers. My own websites are on those servers, I wouldn’t be doing this hosting if I didn’t trust it like that. But it doesn’t matter whether you go to koolwebhstong.com or somewhere else, you want to find out how fast your website is loading.

And if it’s not loading fast, there are two main steps that you can fix possibly yourself.

One, change your hosting. That’s going to be very important to look at how many images or if there’s a video on the site, and if there is lower the quality of the images. Yeah, they’re not going to look as good, but your site’s going to load a lot faster. Or get rid of that video and put an image there instead. Those are the two biggest things that you can do to fix that. But step one, of course, find out if your website is loading slow, go to Tysfreebook.com and download the workbook “Is your website search engine friendly?” One of the things in the workbook is to find out how fast your website is loading, you can find out yourself and it’s not going to cost you a penny to do so.