In 2014 Google announced that they would be giving a slight SEO boost to sites with HTTPS. That’s fantastic! …but what does this all mean? Unless you’re fluent in web development techno-babble, you are probably among most people who know that http or https is the first part of most URLs… and that’s about it. Today we are going to help change that – we’re going to introduce you to HTTP, HTTPS, and why it’s even important.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a system protocol through which data is sent from your browser to the site you are on. When a site has HTTP, the data is not encrypted and it focuses only on how the data is presented to the user. HTTP is also “stateless”, meaning it doesn’t keep data on the previous web session. This means there is less data to send and slight increase in speed, however, if you want to track how users are getting to your site for analytics and SEO purposes HTTP will not be of much help that tracking data is lost.
HTTPS is a world of difference… When a site has HTTPS it uses an SSL (secured socket layer) to encrypt the data, keeping your information safe from hackers and 3rd party tampering. You will typically find HTTPS on most bank, credit card, and online shopping sites. Now, you may be thinking “that’s nice, but I’m not asking for payment info on my real estate website so why should I be reading this?” Well, apart from increased security for all the information that gets sent from your visitors browsers to your website, Google has added a nice little reward so to speak for switching to HTTPS… Google wanted to “encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web” and what better way than to give a little reward through increased SEO ranking? Not much.
There are also a few other benefits from switching to HTTPS, like increased referrer data. When you go from site to site, information about the originating site as the source of traffic is transferred to the next site, and so forth – unless you are going from an HTTPS -> HTTP site, then this data is lost. The reason you want to have referrer data is that it helps you see where the traffic to your site is coming from. The more information you have on your site visitors the more you can cater to their needs and optimize your site for better SEO and usability.
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