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There are many factors that go into how Google or any other search engine will choose to rank your website. If you’ve ever read much about SEO, then you probably already know the importance of optimizing the pages of your website and creating links to your website. If not, feel free to read any of the hundreds of blog posts on this site to learn more about that stuff. What I want to talk to you about today are two little things that you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about that can greatly damage your search rankings. They are:

Bad hosting

and

Bad pages

By bad hosting, I mean hosting that goes down often. Here is the problem: if Google visits your website and it is down, that is a black mark against you. The first time it happens, it may not hurt you. But if it happens repeatedly, Google is going to greatly downgrade its opinion of your website. As a result, your rankings in Google will plummet. If you have no idea if and when your website goes down, you should use a website monitoring service that will tell you when your site goes down. One that we have used is www.freewebmonitoring.com. There are many other services that do the same thing. Some are paid, so they may be more advanced, but a free service will do you just fine.

If you find that your website goes down often, my advice is to change hosting companies. It is a pain moving your website, especially if it is connected to a database, but the short-term pain will be your long-term gain in terms of improved search engine rankings. And I hate to say it, but with hosting, sometimes you get what you pay for. That cheap $6 per month hosting plan may work just fine, but there is just as good a chance that it will be a piece of crap. Work Media uses cloud hosting. We like it because it is as reliable as having our own server, but as easy to use as shared hosting (well, almost as easy). It is more expensive than shared hosting, but you will find that your website almost never goes down. Another similar consideration is how quickly your website loads. If you find that your site loads very slowly, that is another ready to upgrade to something better.

By bad pages, I really mean missing pages. If your website has gone through various changes over the years (especially as related to changing content management systems or platforms) then the URLs to your pages may have changed, or some pages just may not exist at all any more. This is a problem because Google HATES it when pages that it has indexed disappear. What you need to do is set up 301 permanent redirects from old pages to their newer counter parts (or even just to your home page). This is a pretty simple thing to do, but exactly how to do it depends on your Web server, what technology your website uses, and things of that nature. If you’re not sure how to go about it, contact someone (like us, for example) who can help you with it.

Work Media is here to take care of all your problems. If your search engine rankings are poor and you just don’t know what the problem is, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.