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Search engine optimization is the best way to get consistent traffic to your web site without having to continuously invest money in advertising and other forms of marketing and promotion. By optimizing your web sites properly you can bring in a steady flow of traffic and forget about marketing and other annoying and repetitive aspects of online business. In fact, many webmasters spend the majority of their time trying to find more ways to increase their search engine ranking and traffic. Unfortunately, many webmasters don’t realize they’ve already hurt their chances of being as successful online by choosing the wrong web hosting plan. Contrary to popular belief, there is a solid connection between web hosting and search engine optimization.

IP Addresses and SEO

For the advanced SEO expert that routinely does link building through various web 2.0 properties, the most obvious aspect of a web hosting plan that has an impact on SEO is the amount of IP addresses given to each webmaster. When search engines index web pages they do so with automated crawlers that index every aspect of the page and site, including the web site’s IP address. If you own a network of web sites and you would like to build a link network using these sites, then you will need to have a separate IP address for each web site. Fortunately, IP addresses are not a major factor for webmasters that don’t own a lot of web sites that are interlinking in the same niche.

Hosting Reliability and Features

Most people don’t realize that an unreliable hosting network can have a negative impact on a web site’s search engine ranking and site indexing. When your web site is down (as it often may be with unreliable web hosting) search engine robots will be unable to index your new pages. This may have a very negative impact on the amount of pages that are indexed for your site, and how often updated pages are indexed in the search engine results.

A powerful hosting plan will also be able to handle more software installations and tasks, which can be especially useful if you are using automated software for link building or to perform  other mundane tasks involved with SEO.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is another overlooked connection between your web hosting plan and your SEO efforts. The robots.txt file is a file that is located on your web server, which dictates how robots (particularly search engine bots) interact with your web site. If the robot.txt file is set to dis-allow all robots then your site will not be able to get ranked by any search engine, leaving you without any form of SEO traffic. Most hosting companies leave this file blank or do not include, so it is important to verify whether or not the robots.txt file is present in the web server that hosts your web site.

Practicing effective search engine optimization involves many factors, and just when you think you understand it all you find out that there is so much more to learn. Every aspect of your website needs to be considered when optimizing your site for targeted traffic from the search engines. This means you’ll even need to consider the kind of web hosting you use. The reliability of a web host is perhaps one of the most importation attributes in the industry. If your web host is not efficient at keeping your site up and running then your search engine optimization efforts could lose their efficacy in time.

Downtime and Crawlers

If you’re in the business of search engine optimization then you know that search engines use crawlers to index the entire web including your site. If your site is down when these crawlers visit your site, then the search engine cannot crawl the site and index any new changes made to your site. This means any optimization efforts you recently made will go unnoticed. If this happens several times you could be greatly hindering your search engine optimization efforts without even realizing it.

Server Speed

Having a slow loading website is another factor that could hurt your search engine optimization efforts. This means you’ll need to use a web host that is known for having reliable and competent servers, and you’ll need to purchase a plan that gives you all of the server resources needed to keep your site running smoothly even when you’ve uploaded a plethora of content and you have hundreds of daily unique visitors. If the page takes too long to load then many visitors will become annoyed and leave the page.

The interesting aspect about Google is that it uses an algorithm to detect how long some on stays at your page before they return to the search engine results. This information is then applied to your site SEO score and it directly affects the way your site is ranked. If your visitors are leaving your site within a few seconds due to s low loading home page, then you can be assured that your site is going to experience a drop in page rank. If you want your site to get to the top of the search engines and stay there, then you will need to make sure you have a reliable hosting plan with plenty of server resources.

IP Addresses

Another factor that plays into your search engine ranking is the IP address of your website. If you use shared hosting then you will be sharing an IP address with other websites. If one of those websites does something to get their site deindexed by the search engines, then you may suffer the same fate. Therefore you may want to consider a hosting plan that gives you your own IP address such as dedicated web hosting. If you really want to get handle on the search engines then you may even want to have access to several IP addresses. To do this you can use SEO hosting services that will lease you several IP addresses per month.

The importance of keyword usage in search engine optimization definitely cannot be ignored, however many people don’t realize the proper way to use keywords, and therefore place unnecessary efforts on frivolous attempts that often prove to be unsuccessful. Failing at an SEO attempt is a very frustrating experience, because many times there is a lot of hard work and invested money involved. By the time you realize your plan is not working, all of the time of the money is gone and you are left wondering what went wrong.

Simply finding the right keywords and then loading your site with them is not going to get you anywhere. In order for your site to flourish, you’ll need the perfect balance between keyword density and keyword placement. But ultimately, which one is more important, density or placement?

Keyword Density

Search engines use web bots called crawlers to index your website’s information. In the process all of the keywords on your site are also indexed. The amount of keywords per the amount of content on your website is called keyword density. Keyword density is calculated in terms of percentage, for example:  5 keywords in a 500 word article would be a keyword density of 1%. While there is no exact standard for the amount of keyword density that should be used, there is a general frame that helps many people reach success. Most people find that using a total site keyword density of about 1%-5% is a great way to boost organic search engine listings.

So how do you do you decide how how high or how low the keyword density should be? The answer to this is directly related to the niche your site specializes in, and which keywords you are targeting. If your keyword is a very popular one, then you may want to go for a keyword density closer to the 4%-5% range. If you have a less popular keyword, then you may want to aim lower. Overall the best way to use keyword density is to start high, at around the 5% range, and then gradually go lower until you find a peak area. It should be noted however that optimal keyword density without proper placement is useless.

Keyword Placement

Keyword placement refers to the placement of the keywords throughout your site, both within the content and design of the website. Placing keywords in the right places plays a crucial role in proper search engine optimization. Search engine optimization experts recommend placing keywords within the first and last 25 words of each piece of content. Keywords should also be placed in the middle of the content as well, with at least one instance being used per article. It also helps to surround the keyword in other sub-keywords. This will help bring more targeted search to your site. Many people search for products or services and then add more information to the search query that contains another sub-keyword. It is also important to include keywords in the title tags of every page, as well as within meta tags and anchor text.

Conclusion

In regards to which is more important, keyword density or keyword placement; many would agree that keyword placement is essential. The reason why placement is more important than density is because packing a site with keywords is easy, and search engines see this as spamming in some instances. However, packing the site with properly placed keywords is not viewed as spamming by the search engines, and instead is seen as useful content.