We all know that Google is the de-facto search engine and as such has a practically monopolistic influence on the internet as a whole. Whilst Facebook is desperately trying to create its own ecosystem to wrest ‘control’ of the internet away from Google, certainly in the medical device industry, there is very little danger of Facebook becoming the dominant force.
So that leaves us at the whim of Google, and being as their corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”, then that might not be a totally bad thing. Whatever your opinion of Google, every now and then they do push certain agendas that just make sense.
We could talk endlessly about their search engine algorithms and SEO strategies, all of which certainly have some relevance, but in recent times a couple of simple issues have also become an important part of how Google decides what order to put those darned search results in.
Rule 1: Security
One of them is pretty simple and no one can say how important it is in terms of search results, but it’s in there somewhere because Google say it is, and anyhow, it just kinda makes sense. It’s SSL, Secure Sockets Layer, or in the real world, the little padlock you see next to the web address of the site you’re browsing in the address bar of your browser.
We used to think of that padlock as being synonymous with paying for something- remember when you clicked checkout and a message appeared saying that you were being taken to an encrypted secure checkout page to type your credit card details into? Seems like decades ago, well it actually is now! Anyway all it actually means is that all of the information that travels between your browser and the webserver that the website is hosted on, is encrypted. And all that that means is that it is practically impossible for someone to ‘see’ what is going on between you and the website you’re using. If you’re just browsing the news you may well reasonably argue, “who cares”, but then again the other argument is well, because we can, why not just encrypt everything; it’s a good habit really. I mean, can you imagine your cell phone calls not being encrypted, as they weren’t back in the ‘bad old days’… So bottom line is, to be polite, to make Google happy, to ‘best serve your website visitors’, and to potentially improve your search results, make sure your website is using SSL.
Rule 2: Speed
The second new ‘rule’ Google inflicted on us is that of performance, well speed really. They have stated that they will actively favour, in search results, those websites whose pages load in less than 2 seconds. Again, common sense really, especially on your phone via the data network, how great would it be if all web pages loaded in TWO seconds or less!
In reality this one is wildly difficult to achieve, but those who try will be rewarded, not only by Google of course, but also by your site visitors, because who doesn’t love a fast website, and get irritated by a slow one. Whilst your ‘time on site’ statistics will fall, (because your users don’t have to wait so long for pages to load!) Your satisfaction rating and traffic in general will definitely improve, as will your search results…
So how to make your website faster? Well, use WordPress, our templates and host with us on our specialised WordPress platform that uses PHP 7. Done!
PHP is basically the program that in combination with the web server software, makes websites work. WordPress is based on it, and the new versions of PHP and WordPress, once combined, have seen performance (speed improvements), of up to, and sometime beyond, 100%. Which translates into your website visitors seeing pages on their screens in half the time that they were seeing them before.
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