Setting up SSL on Your Site

Keep me safe!

I promised, in an earlier blog, to tell you how to set up SSL on your site, but after the process I went through to set it up on a few client sites, I’ve discovered that there are way too many variables and steps to offer you a guide. Instead I am going to recommend that you contact your website developer or your hosting server tech support. I can tell you this much.

You will need to purchase a certificate, from your server or from a third party. I recommend simply getting the standard certificate, it’s the least expensive and is plenty of security for most websites.

You will need to set up the SSL through your cPanel, this is generally a simple selection process, but your tech support can help with that, or your web professional can do it for you.

This final step is different whether you have a CMS based website such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, a code written site or a website builder site, but you’ll need to code your site to force it to the secure version of your site. This is where I recommend working with your web professional.

Should you decide you want to add security to your site and want some help, Copper Moon Media can help you or do the work for you. Contact us for more information.

Google Adds Attention to Security to Ranking – SEO Update

In their ongoing effort to make the internet a safer place Google announced in August, in order to support its stand on internet security or “HTTPS everywhere,” that it would make SSL a ranking factor in their algorithm.(See the video). They began testing the concept before August but rolled out the new algorithm shift in August. Currently “…it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of the global queries.” But this isn’t going to change. In August with the announcement Google stated that they “may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch…” and the early results have shown a positive trend. So my recommendation is to make that change. In my next post I’ll explain what to do to get an SSL certificate.