image(Flickr/ Eric Fischer)
Search engine optimization is a broad field that employs a huge number of different strategies to help sites rank well in the SERPs. From producing awesome content to technical strategies like implementing caching to speed up a site, many web owners are familiar with the basic practices of SEO, but what they don’t consider is the potential benefit of using a specialist SEO host.
An SEO host provides everything that ordinary web hosting companies provides, but they offer an additional service that standard web hosts do not: multiple IP hosting. Multiple IP hosting depends on a company having control of a large block of so-called C-level IPs. Not all companies have control over a sufficiently wide variety of IPs over a sufficiently diverse geographical range to successfully offer the benefits of multiple IP hosting.
SEO hosting companies allow their clients to make use of the large set of IPs they control, and that has a number of significant SEO benefits.
Hub And Spoke Optimization
For various reasons, businesses often choose to split their online presence over a number of different sites: a main site and several small satellite sites, or microsites, that link back to the main one. The central site can be referred to as a hub, and the smaller subsidiary sites as the spokes.
Businesses might choose to do this because they want to address specific market segments in the spoke sites, or build a community around a particular product or service without having to clutter up their main site serving several divergent goals.
Because links to a site are a major ranking factor in search engines, the links from the microsites on the spokes can give the hub site an SEO boost. However, if all of the smaller sites are served from the same IP, Google will notice and discount those links. Using a multiple IP hosting company can mitigate that loss of link juice by having each microsite served from its own IP.
International SEO
Google wants to give its users the most relevant results, and often that means results that are tailored to a particular geographic location. All else being equal, if a French person Google’s croissants they are more likely to be interested in a bakery in Paris than one in New York. Google determines where a site is based on its IP’s geolocation and domain name. If a business begins offering services or products internationally, they are hindered from ranking in the new markets by their distant location.
Serving a site from an IP address local to the searcher can help a site to rank well in that market, and SEO hosting companies have the IPs available to make that happen.
Those are the major benefits of using multiple IP hosting, but there are a whole host of reasons that a webmaster might want to serve sites from more than one IP, perhaps an existing IP has previously been associated with a penalized domain, and a site’s ranking is being harmed through no fault of its own, for example.
If your site’s SEO has been lagging in important markets or you would like to extend your network of sites to benefit from increased traffic from a neglected market sector, then choosing a reliable SEO hosting provider is an effective strategy.
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