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November 2008

‘Shop local’ for your hosting

Many people are aware of the concept of ‘food miles’ in an environmental context, and try to shop for locally sourced products. However, you might be intrigued to learn that buying your hosting locally - i.e. from a company based fully in the UK - can be beneficial to you in a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) context.

Google, and other search engines, can tell where your website is physically hosted and, if you own a .com domain, will use this to influence where you appear in the search engine results. So, for example, if you sell products from a .com domain hosted in the Netherlands (where some apparently UK based hosts have their data centres) then you are more likely to appear higher in the google.nl results than the google.co.uk results!

So when you're choosing a host, or reviewing your current hosting, take great care: the cost of not hosting locally could hamper the results your site delivers for years to come. Contact us for help and advice on selecting a hosting provider.

"Optimisation in time" saves nine

We've spent a lot of time recently retrospectively applying the principles of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to some of our clients' websites. In some cases we started out with websites that, quite frankly, it was surprising ever appeared in the Google results at all - never mind the all important first page of results. As the web matures, using sound Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) principles is becoming a factor vital to ensuring that your website ranks well in the Google results and thus delivers good results for your business.

Some developers don't mention SEO at all; some try to sell you SEO as a 'bolt on' after the website has been developed; and some try to sell you automated submission to a 'large number' of search engines, despite the fact that just four search engines dominate the entire search market: Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo; and that Google, with 80% of the European search market, doesn't allow automated submissions!

Through our work applying SEO principles retrospectively to websites, we've seen some staggering gains in search engine ranking. However, it can also be a much slower process - and therefore more costly - and never quite as effective as if you'd taken the principles of of SEO into account during the initial website development process. So, if you're looking to develop a new website, or redevelop your existing one, make sure you're talking to people who understand the complicated process of Search Engine Optimisation, and be prepared to pay a bit extra for them to go through an optimisation process with you during the website development process.

To update an old saying... "An optimisation in time saves appearing on page 9".