It is still a common misconception among web site owners that a web hosting company is responsible to promote their site in the search engines.  I hear this often where a hosting client will call and say “there’s a company trying to sell me search engine marketing services. I thought you provided that with your hosting?” or “Don’t you submit my site when I started hosting with you?”.

Let’s first define what Web Hosting is. According to Dictionary.com Web Hosting means: A business providing hardware and services to store, maintain, and present Web sites and provide Internet connection to those sites.

This says Web Hosting is a place to store web files. It allows you to say my site is “BigSharkMarketing.com” and people will see it when they type this into a web browser.

Marketing a web site to the search engines is a separate and major component to your business. Think of it this way: You wouldn’t assume your landlord for your company’s building would automatically promote your business on billboards, postcards, yellow pages would you? Online world it’s the same concept.

Now there are many hosting companies these days offering web marketing as a service and that can be to your benefit. Often they will provide combined services and discounts by using both programs. What you do want to consider is making sure they actually have a staff of experienced SEO professionals and not rely on the IT department to optimize and promote your web site (no offense to IT people out there. I certainly couldn’t program or manage networks and nor would I want to offer it ).

Ask your hosting provider if they have SEO services or better yet, check out this site: http://www.hostservices.net -

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.