Choosing the right hosting company is a must in achieving top search engine rankings for several reasons. First, you want to choose a reputable company that has 99.7% uptime or better so that when the search engine spiders and robots make it to your website, your website will be up and operating. If you hosting company tends to have a considerable amount of downtime, then these spiders and robots may just visit your website when it is down and not come back to it for weeks or months.

This is a huge price to pay for being cheap! In this case, being cheap will cost you more money. It is better to choose a hosting company will give you, say 100mb of disc space for your site (most websites come nowhere near to this size and if they do, they are either a major mega website or they have not been optimized for size or speed properly) and the most bandwidth you can get - 30 or 40 gigs, for instance.

If you go with a cheaper hosting site you may get only 10mb of disc space for your site and 1gig bandwidth. The problem with this scenario is that if you go over the disc space or bandwidth limitations, your hosting company will most likely charge you lots more dough. Sometimes a cheaper hosting company will shut your site down if immediate payment is not made. Once again the search engine spider or robot may just pass your by. So it is better to buy more than you need and not have to worry about limitations.

It is also generally a better idea to purchase your domain name at a different place than you have host your website. Some web hosts will do both, but the problem is if you wish to change hosts some website hosts will charge you a hefty transfer fee for you domain name and may take more time than desirable for the transfer. Having your domain name hosted separately gives you more flexibility.

Free hosts can cost you when it comes to search engine rankings. If you have a company like geocities host your website, most likely your website is called www.geocities.com/yoursite.html or some variation. This is not optimal for two reasons. First, if you exceed your bandwidth for the month, this host will shut down your website and put a fancy little splash screen in place of your website stating you have exceeded your bandwidth.

So, if you website is popular, which most likely is your goal, you will spend more time with your website down to customers and search engine spiders and robots. Second, search engine spiders and robots generally give more weight to your homepage than to your subordinate pages. In this case, your homepage is actually geocities.com and your main page is a subordinate page to this homepage. Most search engines will give your subordinate homepage less weight than someone else's homepage at yoursite.com .