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I know a few people, who don’t want to buy a domain and a web host because they don’t know whether they like to blog or not. Of course it would be a stupid investment if you don’t know if blogging is something for you.

If you don’t know, if you a going to like to blog, then try using
Blogger.com – for a week or so – then you will see whether you’d like to blog or not – if it is – buy a domain instantly and select a good web hosting provider .

Well Blogger.com is great for newbies, who want to try web-publishing. But, literally it’s hard to get a popular blog out of Blogger – it can certainly give you some traffic, but I’d only use Blogger for driving traffic to my main self-hosted blog.

Of course all the fun, starts when you get your own domain name. When you get your own domain name you are truly able to do whatever you want to do with your blog. When you have your own domain name you are practically only limited by your imagination.

Below are 8 reasons why you should move to a self hosted blog

1. Google can choose to close down your blog whenever they want to, if they don’t like your blog, they’ll shut it down (it’s proven)

2. It’s difficult to customize Blogger, it isn’t that much customizable – compared to self-hosted WordPress

3. There’s limited template options to choose. If you look at the templates Blogger allows you to choose, you will see how limited it actually is. This blog runs on the Thesis Theme, Thesis gives great flexibility and customization options.

4. Sometime blogs on blogger.com can be very slow to load

5. You also have limited monetization possibilities – well on Blogger
there’s Google Ads, but not many earn that much from that.

6. It’s not social bookmark friendly. Many social bookmarking sites, don’t accept articles from free blogs.

7. Custom URL – When you have your own domain name you will easier be remembered – if you have a hosted blog, your domain name will be less professional and memorable.

8. SEO Friendly – A self hosted blog helps in ranking your website based on the location of your host .

If you consider blogging for more than 3 months I really think you should buy a domain name – you can get one for like $6 a month or so – cheap ? compared to the ROI based on the monetization options available for self hosts blogs.

If you don’t see this as cheap, then I don’t think you should have a
serious business blog – Blogger is great for personal blogs though, unless you want to make it dead popular. If you just want a chill blog and don’t wanna spend lots of money on a blog, just write. Then go for Blogger.

I just need to make clear, that if you want to build a successful and a profitable blog it will be easiest using a self-hosted blogging platform such as WordPress.org.

If you are just a little bit techie you’d be able to set up your own
domain with WordPress. There are some webhosts that offer the “one-click-WordPress-install” – then there’s no need to be techie.

If your host doesn’t have the one-click-installation you just need to upload some files to a server and then install (not a problem at all), even my mom can do that.

My blog is my business, this is a self-hosted blog . I hope your blog is too.

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What is web hosting location?

Every website, blog or every a single webpage is hosted on a webserver that connects to the internet. A webserver is a computer connected to the internet which is owned by a webhosting company ( in most cases, unless you have your own webservers ). A webserver is a computer connected to InterNet. That computer or webserver is located in some country. It has a specific IP address, and from that IP address, it is possible to know in which country or sity or town the webserver is located. The location of your webserver is known as a Web Hosting location.

Search engines ( Google , Yahoo and MSN ) know where your Web site is hosted based on your webserver location and IP details. Your site is ranked according to domain extension and web server location or the IP address location as mentioned above. Now, if you move the site or your domain to another server or a Web Hosting company you first need to know where the web server is located. The location of your webhosting company is an important factor in your search engine ranking

Let me give you an illustration of how a web hosting location can affect your search engine ranking.

Website www.ABC.com was selling shoes, hosted in USA and targeted US visitors, the domain extension is .com This is an ideal situation, where we have a USA domain extension .com targeting USA visitors and hosted on web server located in USA. Over 75 % of the traffic to this site was from search engines, namely Google, Yahoo and MSN with the high search ranking on all the three engines. Now, for some strange reason the company decides to host its site in India where it has its offshore development team. They move their site to servers hosted in India. Now, one month later, the search ranking situation is completely different:

- Google indexes site pages in Google India since the site is hosted in India it assumes that it targets Indian visitors, visits from Google.com come down by 30 – 40 % . The site in Google.com moves to 5 and 6 pages.

- Yahoo India starts to show ranking for the website on 2 nd and 3 rd page. Yahoo.com searches reduce by 30 %

Similar trends are shown by MSN.com

Now lets understand what exactly happened here and why the site showed a decrease in visits from US searches. After site IP changes, all the three search engines showed a decrease in indexed pages. The search results were lower as some of the pages were deindexed.

Site is now receiving 60-70% less traffic from search engines inspite of search engine optimisation and most of visitors now are from India and other international IPs. For site targeted to USA market that is, in simple words not targetted traffic. Now, even by increasing the backlinks the site results from search engine rankings did not increase, Google started to give low value to backlinks from US sites as it did not determine it to be valuable.

Backlinks from India based sites were now more valuable to Google. Due to a small number of India based sites operating in the same niche industry, the website was not very popular even on India based search results. Onsite search engine optimization like meta tags don’t help much here as the search engines don’t understand where the site is located by reading the Meta tags but it can give you targeted traffic for a particular keyword search.

GeoTargeting
It is well known that search engines are using GeoTargeting to list sites related to visitor’s IP (country) and this is one of the most important factors in ranking. The search engines also look for language used on website and server location. For the above site, English language and hosting in India, show that the site is targeting the indian market.

So, to target USA market, .com domain, web server hosting location in USA, English language, links from sites (.com, .net) hosted in US are of prime value and importance to Google.

To target UK market, domain co.uk , English web server hosting location in UK, links from UK domains are of prime value and importance to Google.

To target Canada market, .ca domain, English web hosting located in Canada, links from Canadian domains are of prime value and importance to Google.

Targeting Local Markets
Due to cheap web hosting, many international sites are hosted in USA but this could be a problem for search engine and SERP. If you are targeting some other country, use domain with that country extension, get links from other sites hosted in that country, link to other sites in that country, use local language and keywords. The state for the hosting is not important, moving the site to a web server located in a different state can only show you a small difference.

Conclusion
The right target audience is important for your site, so target your visitors better, localize you content. Get a domain name with an appropriate extension based on your target market, host your site located in the country that you are targeting, get links for related sites and use local keywords. If you have an affiliate website or blog this becomes important. You won’t get any traffic from Google hosting your site in India and targeting US visitors.

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