SEO Essentials: the Proper Web Server and Platform - Proper Web Hosting Package Selection
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One of the most serious mistakes webmasters and online business owners commit is the wrong selection of web hosting packages. This will affect your SEO campaign in the long run, and will limit your efforts to maximize your campaign.
If you are selecting web hosting packages, make sure they allow full FTP access to your website, full CMS access to the website template, and 301 redirection.
If you have full FTP access to your website, you can freely upload and download any files you need. You can also configure important server directives such as .htaccess for Apache or global.asax in ASP.NET. Full FTP access is very important in SEO for two reasons:
- You can upload files which directly affect your SEO campaign, such as robots.txt and sitemap.xml. Preventing duplicate content is easily implemented with robots.txt; if you are not allowed to upload files, then you'll have problems using this protocol. Htaccess in Apache is used to do server redirects and rewrite URLs (done at the development stage of the website); global.asax is used for this in ASP.NET.
- SEO onsite improvements such as making the website template SEO friendly (like revising title tags, putting internal links on a dynamic web template) needs detailed work with template files which can be best manipulated through an FTP work. Doing back-ups (an important aspect in SEO onsite work), is also convenient and easy to be done through FTP.
Why is full CMS access to the website template important? Many dynamic websites are powered with a database (such as MySQL) and a content management system. Some hosting providers limit your access to just adding and editing content, but not editing the HTML/PHP or ASP templates. This limits your ability to improve the website templates you are using to make them more SEO-friendly. So make sure you confirm with them that you are allowed to modify and edit template files. This is important.
Finally, if you select IIS as the web server, make sure you or they can facilitate important 301 redirection. Remember, moving sites can best be implemented with a 301 permanent redirect. Although Google and other search engines recently added features to help move websites, a 301 permanent redirect is still the best solution.
If you use IIS, keep in mind that some online business owners or webmasters find it hard to move websites. Doing so requires access to the Windows server computer control panel, such as the one shown in the screen shot below:
In Apache, redirection can be configured in an .htaccess file.
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