By Mark Attwood | Marketing
From an SEO perspective you NEED to have a secure certificate on your website. Google prefers secure sites pure and simple. You need an SSL. I need an SSL. But what is an SSL?
“SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It provides a secure connection between internet browsers and websites, allowing you to transmit private data online. Sites secured with SSL display a padlock in the browsers URL and possibly a green address bar if secured by an EV Certificate.” Source
But SSL’s are not free or even inexpensive. They are also a pain-in-the arse to set up and require a level of technical skill beyond most business owners.
These are the typical kind of prices I’ve been seeing in my recent searches:
So, I’m over the moon to tell you about CloudFlare.com – a community of webmasters that have come together to give us, the little guys, the same level of speed, functionality and security that the Big Guys have. In their own words:
“CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks”
The good news is that through CloudFlare, you can get an SSL for free, and it will improve the speed of your website – all fantastic for SEO.
The bad news is, that as small business owners, you probably haven’t got the technical knowledge or time to get it done.
I’m telling you straight, you need to get this done if you want better rankings in Google.
So, you’ve got 3 options:
1. Go to CloudFlare.com and try and do it yourself
2. Pay your webmaster to do it for you.
3. Let us do it for you for £29 one-time fee.
If you choose (3), you need to send us the following (use this contact form):
1. Who you registered your domain with
2. Logins to the above
3. An E-mail address for the CloudFlare account
4. Your website address
After you’ve paid using this PayPal button:
The work will be done within 7 working days.
Now – get secure!
(BTW – my sites are not yet SSL’d at the time of posting because they’re going through a massive overhaul, but I assure you they will be and, yes, we will be using CloudFlare)
14/4/15 UPDATE:
Following the comment below from Paul (thanks Paul), I made this video with my mate Andy Jones (who recommended CloudFlare to me and runs a bespoke software development company) to explain exactly what it is and how it works:
