Dec 7, 2015
Can I still rank high in search results if I'm using a free web hosting platform?
I want to create a website for my business. The most popular free platforms for this seem to be WordPress and Wix. My question is if I create my website on one of these platforms can I still rank high in search results? Does the SEO credit go towards me or does it go towards the web host that I choose?
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Dec 13, 2015
HI Marjan,
Lots of third party CMS providers are pretty good at helping you set correct SEO strategies for your website. They are built with that interest in mind because they know their customers are looking at that, so their platform are really straight forward. Choosing between CMSs and providers is a matter of how you find the platform easy to use, to take advantage of and to integrate with your other resources, and actually cost effectiveness play an interesting role in here too.
You've got great answers, and you have to consider what are the critical features your website will have because based on that majority of providers differentiate tremendously. From your 2 options, I would choose Wordpress over wix. However, do your research better, for example, do you know there are two wordpress version to use? wordpress.org and wordpress.com, both with interesting differences. There're also other great providers, like squarespace and more (someone mentioned about this one too).
You will rank accordingly to google and any other search engine guidelines and rules. Ranking high generally depend on lots of factors like for example web authority, popularity, good valuable content, customer and visitors responses, feedbacks and interaction with the website, comments, years online, images and every element you will use. Everything in place in your website have a purpose. And there is one important factor most people are not aware when starting, and that is competency. How is your competition doing online? What are they lacking that you can improve?
The 'credit', as you said, will go to your website, to your links, images, and external participation on social media or even any other outlets and groups.
There are people going online and doing amazingly good with seo because they could honestly bring thousand or millions of visitors in a short period of time and keep them interested in coming back. At the same time, people with years in business online have rarely captured their intended traffic because of industry factors, online participation frequency and even their personal interest into it. SEO and hence the ROI is a continuous process you can work on at your own pace, budget and with an intended plan in hand; after all, one of the main purpose, if not the only one, is to have a sale. How are you serving your visitors? What are you offering or selling to them? why do you want them to come to your website and do after?
Success to you.
Sol.
Dec 7, 2015
Marjan,
You can most certainly rank high with whatever platform you choose to use. Just wll come down to all the normal factors that will help you rank (dwell time, link backs, social shares etc...). I would suggest that you check out Squarespace though as I think you'll like it better than WordPress. Best of luck!
Thx,
Dave
Dec 7, 2015
Dear Marjan,
It does not matter who hosts your site - as long as your website isn't hosted on some slow platform or any platform when site is not reliably served. WordPress is an excellent option - I can not speak same about Wix to be honest.
You can easily find a good WordPress hosting provider. Number of shared-hosting providers are good - some are bad - check before committing.
When you think of SEO, you have to focus on content. SEO is a mix of many dimensions:
1. On Page SEO - Which is about your page content and ensuring that you follow the standards and best practices such as Page Title, use of H1/H2 tags, image alt/title properties etc.
2. Off Page SEO - Is all about what others say about your content. How many legitimate people link their website to you.
So overall, it is all about 'Content' and 'Authority'.
To start with, focus on content. Find a good WordPress theme so that you have fairly standard layout. Do not compromise on mobile-friendliness and ensure your content is good, unique, and well written.
Number of things can be said but I hope this short answer has given you some perspective.
You can write to me and I can guide you and review your content with constructive feedback.
Regards, Sharad
Dec 7, 2015
As everyone has noted, it's about implementing the right SEO strategy, not the platform. There are many other free platforms to choose from. To make the right choice for your business, you may want to read this article that has received almost 11,000 views from the Manta Community: http://community.manta.com/t5/Marketing/How-Do-You-Choose-Between-Wix-Weebly-Jimdo-WordPress-and/m-p/164#!#U164
Dec 7, 2015
I think Sharad gave you a really good detailed response but I think sometimes us tech people get carried away with our acronyms. So just to piggy back, SEO stands for search engine optimization and google has some good notes on it. Definitely take advantage of the google my business app. After they verify your business they will provide you with a file that you can upload to your website which will allow you to use their free analytic suites which can tell you how to optimize your page. You will want to register your business on several business page registries and only use the free services. The free web hosting platform has to let you use code. So you add tags that describe your business. One thing to keep in mind is you want to build your website Mobile "Responsive" - this means it can display nicely between cell phones,tablets and desktops because google will rank mobile responsive sites first. I recommend going to WC3 schools and take a few hours to learn Twitter Bootstrap which helps you created responsive pages. Also you can always pay for ads through Google where you only pay for each click to your website. If you don't do that I suggest a serious youtube campaign where you give out free advice and provide a link back to your page. This really drives traffic.
Dec 9, 2015
Dear Marjan,
When we build website its is necessary to SEO guidelines and friendly. So if you build your website on cms based website which are mostly seo friendly help you to get high rank, but agaign comprehesive or custome design will provide you more successful results. Web hosting is also important in seo, suppose your website is hosted on shared server there is too much traffic on that server, too accepting and delivering so many request at same time may be your website be slow and taking too much time to respond in that case you can see error "Webpage not available". So I would suggest you to host your website on VPS servers.
Thanks
Sumit Vats
Digital Marketing Expert
Aone Web Media
Dec 13, 2015
I trusted my website hosting issues to http://v-sys.org/services/hosting/blog_hosting . This provider offers great services at quite reasonable prices.