The term search engine optimization (SEO) refers to all measures by which web pages can climb in the ranking of search engines. For webhosters, measures from the field of search engine optimization are of enormous importance. On the one hand, customers specifically choose hosters that enable SEO optimization of websites, on the other hand, webhosters themselves are dependent on search engine optimization in order to win new customers.
The principle of search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is probably one of the most important measures for operators of Internet presences. No wonder: More than 95 percent of the services and goods that are sold over the Internet were found through the use of a search engine. The higher a website's ranking in search engines, the more visitors it receives. A high flow of visitors means more customers and consequently more sales and profit. The same principle applies to web hosts. They can win new customers with a successful search engine optimization. A not insignificant part of the customers looks for the web host after services from the area of search engine optimization, which is why the offered Webspace or the web packages provided should meet various criteria. One of the fundamental advantages of search engine optimization is that it increases the flow of customers for free. Unlike paid search results, organic improvements are a permanent and free way to acquire customers.
Search engine optimization: SEO requirements for web hosters
The hosting of a domain has an impact on the ranking in search engines. Therefore, many interested parties choose web hosters that offer search engine optimization functions. With hosting, domain and web space should be registered together. The .htaccess file must be available so that redirects can be set up. Subdomains must be able to be furnished, so that independent domain ranges can be paged out on these. Keywords that are included in the subdomain name receive a high weighting by search engines, so the existence of this possibility is highly relevant. Shops and modules are dependent on the Apache module "mod_rewrite" being able to be activated. With this module, dynamic websites such as shops can generate search engine friendly URLs. In general, high processing power and fast response times are essential for websites with millions of subpages, high traffic and complex page layout. Web pages with poor performance are included in Google's index incompletely and more slowly. Each hosting account or domain should be assigned its own IP address. In shared hosting thousands of domains share one IP address: That's why search engines potentially classify them as less important.
The early history of search engine optimization
In the 90's webmasters started to optimize their websites for search engines. In the beginning, it was enough to send the URL of the web page in question to the search engine so that it could direct its web crawlers to it. The web crawlers indexed the website. Then a program, the indexer, read information from the web page. The indexer primarily examines words and links to other pages. Search engines can only filter out texts, links, headings, keyword volumes and similar. Videos and images cannot or can hardly be used by search engines. Therefore the correct design of text content and an efficient structure of links and backlinks are among the essential tasks of search engine optimization. In the 90s it was quickly recognized what potential is associated with the establishment of a search engine optimization. Therefore, companies were founded which focused on the optimization of websites for search engines. In earlier times search engines were dependent on many factors, which could be manipulated by webmasters. Therefore, the ranking was very often misused. The success of a search engine depends to a large extent on whether really relevant search results are displayed. Search engines that could be easily manipulated had a slump in user numbers. In order to adapt to the circumstances, the major search engine operators began to make their algorithms more complex and to add factors that webmasters could not influence or could only influence with difficulty.
