Working with server-side factors

- Well content and links can affect your website search engine visibility, your web server can also can also play a big role in how search engines view you website. The key here is to make sure that you're serving up pages fast, and you're serving them up reliably. Remember, a search engine is trying to give its users the best experience possible and sending them to a page on a server that's down half the time, one that takes an eternity to load is not going to be a quality experience. First and foremost, a web server is just a computer and the performance of any computer relies in part on the hardware and resources it has available.

Things like the number and type of processors, the amount of memory, the quality of the network and the connection to the internet can all be important. You want to talk to the people responsible For hosting and managing your web server to make sure the resources are appropriate to serve pages quickly and minimize any downtime. The physical location of your web server can also affect your search engine visibility. As visitors interact with your website, search engines will often collect data around how fast all the elements of your pages are loading for them.

If a visitor is in one country and your web server is located on the other side of the world from him, the page may be loading very slowly which is a concern for search engines. Generally, you want to make sure your web server is geographically located where most of your potential website visitors will come from. If you expect a significant amount of traffic from across the entire world, you may want to consider a web hosting solution that can help distribute requests for your pages across a global network of computers and even if you're serving up pages locally, you may also want to consider speeding things up by using Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help serve big files like images or a video from these servers that are located all over the world.

As a side note, there are some other considerations you want to be aware of when it comes to International SEO and you can learn more at the International SEO fundamentals Course here at LinkedIn Learning. Another thing that will help your pages load quickly is cashing. Your website may be configured to pull content and other information from a database on your web server every time a user requests one of your pages. Content management systems like WordPress, Dribbble, Jumla and more work this way and virtually every product page you've ever seen on an Ecoma's website is being constructed from calls to a database.

One way to minimize the time consuming database workload in these situations is to enable server site cashing. This is where your web server interacts with your data base only once in order to generate a given page and then it saves a copy of that content on the server for a period of time. Once that copy has been made, each subsequent view of that page will load the content that's been saved on the server, bypassing any redundant database work. Many content management and Ecoma systems have plug-ins or settings built in to help you accomplish this.

Another thing to consider is that search engines like Google have expressed a preference for secure sites using the HTTPS protocol, and Google has even indicated that this can be a ranking signal. In fact, as of July 2018, the Chrome browser, a Google product, began warning users that they are accessing an HTTP site and what that means for the web security making it even more valuable to choose HTTPS. And last but not least, you want to make sure that your web server is consistently running and never experiencing any downtime.

If your server is constantly down, search engines will consider you site unreliable and they won't want to suggest it to their users. There are several online services that can help monitor your server uptime and downtime if this is a particular area of concern. Making sure you're doing everything you can from the web hosting perspective to load content fast, securely and reliably will not only keep your users happy with your website, but it will also make your site more attractive to the search engines who send them there.