There are many things a hosting company can do to optimize your website for search engine performance. Blizzard Internet Marketing is taking all of these practices and rolling them into one package, the Hosting Level SEO package. This grouping of services encompasses all of the latest optimization best practices for hosting. So the real question is, what are these services and what will they do to help your site gain exposure, traffic, and search engine rankings?
First, we install a 301 redirect on your site. This redirect is a best practice and is suggested by the major search engines. A 301 redirect will take the traffic received by the non www version of your site and send it to the www version of your site. For example if you click on this link, http://blizzardinternet.com, it will not take you to http://blizzardinternet.com it takes you to http://WWW. blizzardinternet.com. Google calls this canonicalization. If your site does not use canonicalization, Google actually sees your website as two different sites, the non www and the www version. This can lead to problems with search engines indexing your site and in some cases may even result in duplicate content penalties.
Second, we give your site a unique IP address. Every website on the internet has an I.P. address associated with the regular URL you are used to seeing. This IP address looks like this 12.19.68.32. It is possible for many websites to share an I.P. address when hosted by the same company. The hosting company simply needs to know which website you are requesting and sends you to the right spot on their servers. Sharing an I.P. address can be bad thing. Search engines will check to see what other websites share the address which can lead to confusion if the site are really separated. The best example of this would be having one phone and 20 roommates in your house. It’s easy for you to figure out who the phone is for but the people calling you might not expect 20 people to be attached to the phone number. It’s much better to have your own phone number. A unique I.P. address does the same thing by giving your website its own phone number.
Third, we set up a custom 404 page that uses your website’s design and navigation. A 404 error page is the annoying black and white page that you get when you type in a URL in that does not exist. This error page does little to encourage your potential customers to stick around and look at the rest of your website. However, by utilizing a custom 404 page your customers have a good chance of finding what they are looking for instead of going back to Google and searching for something else.
Fourth, we put a robots.txt file on your website. This file is a page that can be viewed but has no links from any pages on your website. Every time a robot (more commonly known as a spider) comes to your website it looks for a robots.txt file. This file tells the spiders how to behave on your website. If there are certain things that you don’t want it to see or certain spiders you do not want to crawl your website, you can tell them that in a robots.txt file. As this is enough to make having a robots.txt file worth it, there is also evidence that Google favors a website with this information. It seems that they like to know that you are paying attention to your website and that you care how Google views it.
Fifth, a broken link analysis is performed on your website. A link analysis will find all of the links on your website that are pointing at non-existent pages. These broken links confuse the search engine spiders. If a website confuses a spider, there is a chance that the spider will not come back as often and your website is less likely to be fully indexed. Once the analysis is complete, we will make it available to you. If you have an ADMA agreement with Blizzard Internet, we will send the analysis to the designers to fix any problems.
Sixth and last we build a search engine sitemap. These are different than the sitemaps that may already be on your website. This sitemap tells the search engines every single page on your website, how important you think they are, how often the pages change, and if you think the search engines should spider it. We build this sitemap, put it up on your website, and then ping Yahoo, Google, and Ask.com with the location of the map.
These six items will help your website’s exposure. If you are not a current Promotion client, this is an SEO plan that can be implemented on your website quickly and easily. If you are a Promotion client, talk with your account manager to see if the plan will work for you. For more information on the Hosting Level SEO plan please contact our Business Development office.
