Why you need HTTPS and SSL now: October’s Google Chrome update
HTTPS and SSL are ready for you, but are you ready for them? Visit your website. Do you see the green padlock informing you that you have a secure SSL certified connection. If not you will lose up to 60% of your web traffic after this October. Why is that? In October’s update 62 for Google Chrome users will get warnings if they attempt to visit an insecure HTTP only site. Chrome is a browser that is used by 60% of all people on the web. Warnings of security problems will scare away anyone visiting your site for business or personal reasons.
Glossary definition: Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of improving your website’s performance and content to reach more people. In addition to other IT services we enjoy helping you with your website development needs.
When setting up an SEO strategy, you want to consider keywords and setup tools to measure it.
First, let’s setup a way to measure your progress. Assuming you own your organization’s website, we will focus on using the tools Google Analytics and Search Console. In this example, we use WordPress for our website so we will use a WordPress Plugin. Yoast SEO provides a great tool for managing your site’s SEO. They offer a free or lite version which will serve our needs just well for now. They also offer a premium version of their plugin which is certainly worth purchasing when you need more features to market your website.
Since Yoast SEO will manage the connection, we will start by installing it on WordPress. Login to your WordPress admin panel, usually at www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ and go to the dashboard. Please note that you’ll need to replace www.yourdomain.com with your website’s actual URL.
Next, select Plugins and Add New on the left side bar.
Type “Yoast” in the Search field and use the Install Now button.
To get started using Yoast SEO we need to connect it to your Google Analytics account. Find the new Yoast SEO icon which looks like ‘Y SEO’ and click on it. From there navigate to the Webmaster Tools Tab section and you’ll see a blank area beside Google verification code (marked 3 in the screen below). Leave this here for now, we will come back to it later. Open a new browser tab for the next setup in Google.
We will cover Google Analytics and Google Search Console in our next post, but it you’re an overachiever and want to do it yourself you can click the link in the Yoast SEO plugin configuration called “Get your Google verification code in Google Search Console.”
