The first of these is the number of accounts hosted on the same server. Hosting companies will often cram as many accounts on the one server as possible in order to maximize profits. If some of these accounts have high traffic, they can slow the server down for everyone else. But in addition to this, the more accounts trying to use the same server resources will slow the server down anyway. Consequently your site can be penalized by Google for slow delivery of content.

The second issue is that hosting companies can often limit the amount of time it allows a search engine crawler on the server. This can prevent the Google crawler as an example, being able to get through all the pages it needs to each visit which can slow down the indexation of your website's pages.

If you use Firefox as your browser, you can get an extension called Flagfox which will tell you how many website accounts are hosted on your server. It also provides a huge amount of other useful information as well.

As a small business, you will also be chasing a local geographical market and consequently should have your hosting in the country in which you operate. As the vast majority of your visitors will be from your own country, the speed of rendering the site will be greatly improved, given equality of hosting servers, if you host in your country of origin. For example, if you operate in Australia and host in the US, a visitor's browser from Australia is not going to have to wait while the internet hops from Australia to the US and back again to deliver the page. And remember, this happens every time the visitor calls a new page. Small businesses in Australia can look at Bushsong Hosting for fast hosting on a virtual private server.

So in order to improve your prospects of higher small business rankings, always host on a quality server in your country of origin. This is but one strategy that can enhance your efforts with your small business SEO.