Does Server Location Have Impact on Your SEO Rankings

SEO, this subject has been discussed frequently in blogospheres and forums but so far no concrete answer has ever been given. When you speak of SEO (search engine optimization), it means that you are doing what it takes to make the search engines happy and rank your site well in the search results. Because some SEO search results are filtered by the host server’s geographic location, and search engines tend to see your website location according to its IP address, it is possible that your server location can have an impact on your SEO rankings.

SEO – Location plays a role

Let us take for example that you have a Los Angeles web design but it focuses to cater to the search needs of the people in London, it might be difficult to be SEO ranked well and get good traffic for geographic targeted search terms if the search engines have seen that your website is located in Los Angeles. Therefore, for the question asking on whether server locations have impact on your SEO rankings, the answer should be YES. At least for now, when the SEO works the way it does.

SEO – What best to do

It seems that at the present time, the best thing to do is have your website hosted in the geographic location where you wish to rank for. This is as simple as saying that if you want high ranking in London, your server must ideally be located in London. What it truly means is that search engines place a higher relevancy of sites hosted in a specific country in making their ranks.

The location of the server gives the search engines the information regarding the location of your business. This is need so that they can give more relevant results depending on where the searchers are located. This will give you an idea that a business created by Los Angeles web design or is hosted there is more relevant to the public searching for a product or service in Los Angeles than a website that has its server in London.

SEO – Switching providers

In instances where you need to switch hosting providers, say from Los Angeles to London, you cannot exactly say what impact it will create in your ranking. You may or may not notice some ranking fluctuations in London. You may even fall to the second page or you may move up to the top of the first page. But there are still various factors that may affect these rankings. Examples are (1) how well your website is optimized, (2) your linking structures, and (3) your site architecture.

So there it is. The fact of the matter is that, it will be better to have your website hosted in the country where you want to rank in. The search engines are using a relevancy factor to serve up the most relevant results to users. There is hoping that in the future, all search engines such as Google and Yahoo will do something to rank the most relevant content with disregard to where the business is geographically located. This is not impossible, considering how fast the internet grows these days.You nees SEO.

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