If your website is not secured with a certificate, it’s time to investigate your hosting package to see if it’s available to enable. Not sure if you have it? Navigate to your website and check out the web address. If you see a lock symbol and/or “httpS” before your website domain name, you are all set! If not, it may be as simple as redirecting the unsecure site to the secure site. Or perhaps it will be a bit more involved and require an upgrade to your hosting package to have access to this feature (which is a shame because it SHOULD be a default feature on the lowest packages). This is one of the reasons we work with 8DWeb’s CMSDefender. They provide security and a whole host (no pun intended) of other important features at their flat rate of $15/month. Adding this to your website is extremely important because browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox will not even allow users to navigate to non-secure websites without redirecting them to a warning page first. The user then must go to the advanced options and choose to “trust” the website. Only after this will Chrome navigate a user to a non-secure website.
- NOTICE: if you have an SSL certificate but your site still throws an error, there is some more tuning that needs to be done on your site that might require some professional help.
- FACT: as of DATE???, Google has been punishing sites that are not protected with a valid SSL certificate. That is like getting flagged in the pits and being disqualified to even race.
3. Page Speed
- Google Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- GTMetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/
These tools will help you identify ways to decrease your page loading time (less = more). It will recommend compressing your code and image files, optimize file sizes, etc. This is important because people are lazy and impatient, according to studies. How long are you willing to wait for a web page? Most people don’t ever want to wait more than 3-5 seconds for a page to load. If your site needs over 10 seconds to show up, chances are people won’t even bother waiting and they’ll move on to the next option (you lose!). Google also rates sites based on speed and will more readily recommend a fast site than a slower counterpart. How quickly does your site go from 0 to 60 mph?
5. Image Tagging
Tagging Images – Every image can be customized on the “back end” to help your SEO. It can be labeled/tagged to add a description of what is shown in the image. Since search engines can only harvest text, they look for these tags to assist them in understanding the content on a page. Tagging images is also an essential task for ACESSIBILITY for a website. Blind users that utilize screen reader assistance tools rely on alt tags to “see” images and multimedia. An additional step you can take is giving the image file a relevant name with appropriate keywords. Yes, Google can even see the file names being used on the site. Tagging = Turbo.
