Improve SEO With SSL Security

Want to increase the ranking of your site in search engines? For a long time webmasters have been trying to work out the best way to get the most out their website when it comes to how well it ranks in search engines, especially Google. Now there may be a new tip to help boost your ranking, courtesy of Google themselves.

Rather unusually for Google, they released an article in 2014 which spoke about certain parts of their search algorithm (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html). According to this, Google are now going to be including whether or not a site has an SSL certificate in their search rankings. This means that having an SSL certificate may be a useful tool to help your website climb to the top of search results made using their site.

Google have said that one of the reasons they have done this is because they wish to have a more secure web for all users. This means that this tool to help your website climb the rankings may well be a change which is here to stay.

SSL, or secure socket layer certificates, serve as a protection layer for your site and are used to encrypt and decrypt the information between browser and server to ensure data transmitting over an open network cannot be intercepted and abused, allowing users to trust your site with sensitive information. Used primarily when a website takes private and confidential information from users, such as user names, passwords and any other personal data.

This extra layer of security means that customer information will be a lot more secure when inputting this into your site.

Other than the security improvements that the SSL certificates offer, they also provide potential benefits to your website's 'SEO'. This acronym stands for 'Search Engine Optimisation' which, basically, is a term for how well your website will rank in search engines.

As Google have stated, they are now using whether or not a site has an SSL Certficate to influence where your website will appear in their results. This could mean that should you choose to use an SSL certificate you could see an improvement ranking in the results of search engines, therefore, hopefully driving more traffic to your site.

In short, the answer would be no. Once you have applied the certificate to your site there are some simple changes you will need to make (and in some cases no changes) in order to redirect all visitors to HTTPS.

We provide an easy to follow guide on these changes within our Changing from HTTP to HTTPS page.

If you are a Freeola customer and would like some guidance on how to add an SSL certificate to your site, please call the Support team on 01376 55 60 60 or submit a Support Ticket.