Choosing a Hosting Provider

If you or your business is thinking about starting a website but don't know where to begin, the first step is choosing a hosting plan. These are the basic types to consider:

Free Hosting: Not a viable business plan, typically. Free hosts will put burdensome limits on how you can use your websites, they will probably force you onto a pre-existing domain, and you can virtually count on down-time, slow loading speeds, and general technical problems or limitations. This website is hosted with free hosting on Blogspot - definitely not a bad deal for a quick blog, but it lacks some of the functionality and customization that prevents me from turning this into a full-blown website.

Shared Hosting: The lowest cost level of service that is viable for a business. Shared hosting operates by placing several domains and user accounts on the same computer server. Users "share" the resources for a nominal monthly fee - typically $5-$9 per month. If you're a novice to website building, make sure this has an auto-installation script for online software like Wordpress and Blogger. This will allow you to set up a site like this one in just a few clicks, on your own domain, with better reliability and fewer restrictions on how you can monetize the pages.

Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting is one user account matched up to one computer server. The advantage is speed, reliability, and improved customer service from the provider company. The downside: cost! Dedicated servers are extremely expensive compared to the other choices: they can cost hundreds, even thousands a month depending on traffic volume (of course, if you have enough traffic to spend >$1,000 a month in server costs, its probably worth the cost to keep that web site online.

Host Re-selling: The entrepreneurial take on shared hosting. A user buys hosting, and then turns around and sells some of his or her resources to the end-client. This is usually cheaper than shared hosting, but its possible that someone could lease 50% of a dedicated server - so the price fluctuated in a wide range depending on the specific offer at hand. This could be a great deal if you're using a professional web designer. A point of negotiation could be to ask for free hosting through an existing account of the web designer. Dreamhost is one well-known web host that provides an option for re-selling, and they also offer steep discounts in the form of coupons and promotional codes.

It is important to consider these pros and cons before signing a contract, paying the bill, and committing your new websites to a certain server. Changing servers after establishing a site is a time-consuming and somewhat risky process.

Coding Counts

One of the most fundamental and essential aspects of SEO is the use of proper coding.

Page titles should accurately reflect the target search keywords, and the meta description should be about 160 characters and act as an attention grabbing short description of the data in the web page. One of the faults of this free hosted blogger platform is the inability to modify all of the meta data - each page should have unique meta data content.

Images should use alt text - this will help the picture show up on image searches. Title attributes could be helpful for your users, but it is not as essential from a pure SEO standpoint.

Any broken links or buggy code could hurt the rankings for the website. Inactive URLs should be re-directed to relevant pages.

These are the basic things to watch out for in the actual source code of a website you're trying to optimize for SERPs. It is much easier to get it right the first time before the page is published then it is to go back afterward and find problems.