Search Engine Optimization – First Things First – Local Search – I’ve been becoming more aware of and having to deal with a few specific things lately with SEO and campaings for clients.  Must of the time in the past, I’ve done the hosting and had clients sites created for them by my web developers, etc. and their hosting has been on my servers or hosting accounts, with known enviroments and dependability.  Over the past six months, I’ve had a few clients here and there whom I’ve done the same amount of link building and same work I’ve done for the rest of my clients, based upon competition for keywords, and have gotten way less than optimal or expected results, and thus less happy clients.

When I first start on a site, especially if it’s already built, there are a few things that I check for,  www. vs non www, i.e. checking that only one version of their site resolves, or make the appropriate entires into their .htaccess file and creating 301 permanent redirects, and insuring that they have either 100% uptime or 99.9% uptime.   A few of the clients I’ve picked up over the past year have had hosted applications for  their professions (i.e. online scheduling systems, or industry related services as a hosted application) and have found a few with DISMAL uptimes….  97% uptime, 98% uptime, etc.   A few percentage points as far as uptime can have huge consequenses as far as the ability to rank a site.  It a search engine spider goes to your site repeatedly and the pages either take a long time to load, or even worse, your site is down, you need to do something immediately about it, or assume you aren’t going to rank where you want to rank.

There are a few tools out there and uptime monitors you can use to over time, find out your actual availablity.  One free one is www.uptimedog.com .  When checking uptime, the more frequently they check, the better off you are.  The paid service I’m using now checks every 5 seconds.  I’ll find out what the name is and update the post with it, but I’ve found that a few of the sites I was working on wouldn’t rank regardless of what I was doing because of their downtime…  The paid service I use is called Service Uptime.  it’s very reasonable, will send e-mail notifications, and it’s been a HUGE help, both from my own standpoint, and being able to provide documentation to my clients from a neutral third party.

You need to make sure you have a hosting company who either has 100% (or 99.999% ) uptime or find one who does.  It’s not asking that much these days for those percentages of uptime.  Check to see if your hosting company has SLA’s (service level agreements) in regards to uptime, or see if they monitor or guarantee in any way.  If not, find someone who does.  The hosting company I use has awesome uptime, and I frequently have clients move over to them now.  The hosting I use and recommend can be found here.  I’ve used it for the past years and host literally hundreds of sites on it, and it’s rock solid, good uptime, and very reasonable.