Approach

SSL Website Security Is Step 1

It’s simple, folks: look for a PADLOCK or an “i” with a circle around it next to the name of your website, its URL, in the address bar at the top of your computer, tablet or phone browser.

This will determine if your website has an SSL encryption and shows ‘https://www…’ rather than ‘http://www…’

Simply click on the images, screenshots from sites I picked using Chrome as the browser, to enlarge them.

Above you see on the desktop, the “i” with the circle around it says “not secure” right next to the name of the website in Chrome.

This means that it is not encrypted via an SSL certificate for HTTPS security.

For a one-time fee of $100, in most cases, CMO Sync can install a free SSL to deploy your site over HTTPS and make it much less likely to be hacked.

Another important note about having HTTPS enabled on your website: if you do not have it, Google penalizes you heavily and often knocks you off of many top search engine pages.

For SEO purposes, having HTTPS in place is vital, as it verifies you have a safer site, but also makes Google and Bing and DuckDuckGo far happier and more likely to show your site on their searches.

Other SEO factors that we commonly see are inactive or broken pages and links, or in web design software and CMS’s that are not updated properly, and all of these can result in security risks and infiltration, which greatly hurt your SEO prowess online.

As you see above, when you click on the “i” with the circle, it gives a warning that one should not enter any sensitive information on the site.  

This is because it is not encrypted via an SSL certificate and can much more easily be infiltrated by hackers that often use scraping software or keystroke logging on sites infected with malware to steal a user’s information.

For businesses, this is a critical lapse in security that can make their entire client-base and their very business at risk of being hacked, or even being held ransom via ransomware that will deny access to the site and many times the network or databases linked to the site unless the business pays a ransom to have its software unlocked.