HTTPS on Your Website a ranking Boost on Search engine?

Bharath BhushanDigital Marketing BLog, DigitalMarketing, SEO Tips

Now you are worried when switching from your HTTP to HTTPS site for search engine friendly purposes? Not so much. Google has been telling webmasters it is safe to do so for years. But you need to take the proper phases to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. This means make sure to link to Google that you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS. Google promises to release more documentation in the future, but for now has provided the following tips:

https
Source : Moz

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

Advantages of switching to HTTPS:

  1. More referrer data:  Whenever traffic passes from a secure HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site, the referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as ‘Direct.’ This is a problem because you don’t know where the traffic actually comes from. If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like Hacker News shows up as ‘direct’, because Hacker News uses HTTPS. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS. As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.
  2. HTTPS as a rankings boost On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it’s likely you’ll find the effect of any ranking influence to remain quiet small In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS. Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.
  3. Security and privacy: Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That’s not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from HTTPS / SSL encryption. HTTPS adds security in several ways: HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to, Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors. HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers. My advice is this: Make the switch to HTTPS if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.

 

Gmail-for-business-tower

Know the Difference Between Free and Paid Versions of Gmail?

Bharath BhushanDigital Marketing BLog, DigitalMarketing

Google claims there are over 600 million users of its free web email service, Gmail. Within that number are at least several million businesses that use a generic Gmail address to contact customers.

Google sells an almost identical version of Gmail as part of its online productivity suite Google Apps, which costs US$ 5 per user a month. Why you should make a decision to use the paid version of Gmail?

There are seven main reasons which make paying for Gmail a very easy decision.

Gmail for Business - DigitalBharath

                                                                  Image credits : Businessinsider 

Custom Email Address : Businesses that use the free version of Gmail can only send emails as  contactAdmin@Gmail.com. Notice how your bank, insurance company and airline never use consumer email addresses. The reason they don’t is because it looks cheap. For US$5 a month you can have an email address Contact@yourdomain.com. It looks much more professional and is worth it for the branding value alone.

Double the Storage : The free version of Gmail comes with 15GB of space for your documents, emails, photos and other files. The paid version has 30GB on the US$5 a month plan and unlimited storage for US$10 a month (or 1TB if your business has less than five users). Businesses that deal in Microsoft Office documents rarely touch these limits on a per user basis but as we move to using video more often in work, those storage limits will become more relevant.

Guaranteed Uptime:  Google stands behind the paid version of its Gmail with a 99.9% guaranteed uptime. That means the service is designed to operate 24/7 without fail, and that unexpected outages will be less than nine hours a year. While there is no similar guarantee for the free version of Gmail, it rarely has problems either. The guarantee is probably more valuable in theory than reality, as compensation for downtime is limited to the fees paid to Google which are tiny.

Sync Gmail to Microsoft Outlook : Microsoft Outlooks is one of the most popular email clients in the world. However, if you have a free Gmail account it’s not so simple to sync your emails, calendar and contacts. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is a tool that comes with the paid version of Gmail that lets you use Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 effectively with Google Apps.

You get the cost savings, security and reliability of Google Apps as your email server, while employees can use the interface they prefer for email, contacts, calendar and notes.

24/7 Support :This is a huge incentive, especially for businesses that have started to look beyond Gmail at other parts of the Google Apps suite. The free version of Gmail includes access to Google Docs (word processor), Google Sheets (spreadsheets) and Google Slides (presentations) but if you run into problems then you can’t just pick up the phone and give Google a call. For US$5 a month, you can.