As the web has grown, so has the importance of getting the highest possible rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), and ensuring the widest possible breadth in terms of search keywords that deliver results to a website.
It’s not surprising, then, that search engine optimization (SEO) now exists in a range of varieties, from “white hat” to “black hat” to “blue hat,” with techniques and tricks in each category that run from solid to questionable.
There is one technique that is particularly good and quite easy to implement, but it is not used as widely as it ought to be. This method also happens to be acceptable to search engine providers, which ensures you won’t get your site blacklisted. The technique involves taking advantage of global website distribution to geographically distribute your own site.
The “trick” to this technique is to select a web hosting provider that can offer an out-of-the-box solution to globalize your website. Most hosting providers do not offer geographic diversity—and those that do often tend to have only nationally dispersed servers (e.g., data centers in California and New York). I suggest you find a host that offers a wide array of web hosting solutions, all of which should come with geographic diversity as an available feature.
What this means in practice is that if you utilize this type of hosting provider, you can easily distribute your website geographically. In turn, this not only allows you to rank on global search engine websites such as google.com, but it also empowers you to rank in regional search engines (or region-specific versions of global search engines), such as google.ca.
A hosting provider that does offer multi-continent geographic diversity is one that I use personally: GSID.net. This provider’s regional flexibility includes hosting services in Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States and Canada. I make use of all of these locations.
Of course, another advantage to out-of-the-box geographic hosting flexibility is in the end user’s experience. Using servers hosted as near as possible to the website’s end user helps dramatically lower latency—something particularly important for web applications, and equally important to help ensure your visitors return to your website.
When backed with high reliability, solid proactive and reactive support, and flexible and powerful server management features, geographically dispersing your websites can be an even more potent solution to enhance the effectiveness of your SEO network.
There are also scalability benefits to this type of infrastructure: Hosting providers that offer geographical dispersion services also tend to be very skilled in developing totally scalable hosting architectures.
This scalability applies at two levels. At the individual client level, if I wish to upgrade my server infrastructure to handle more traffic, it’s very easy to do. At the data-center level, hosts such as the one I mentioned continue to grow, regularly establishing data centers in new locations, thus providing still more flexibility as to where customers host their websites.
Also important is forming a direct relationship with your infrastructure provider. In many cases I have been able to suggest new data-center locations to my provider, along with solid evidence as to why it may help other clients. One of my suggestions helped lead to the installation of a secondary data center in Germany to help support the company’s primary European data center in the Netherlands. So remember to communicate and be proactive with your infrastructure provider.
Next month, I will discuss the tricks of properly registering domains in bulk without tipping off the search engines to your activities. Until then, work hard and kill some sales!
Pro is a well-known search engine master and consultant within the porn/dating sector who has been active in the industry since 1999. Pro runs a SEO consulting firm that can be found at UntouchedMarkets.com.
This article originally ran in the January 2010 issue of AVN.
