Impact of SSL Certificate and Dedicated IP Address on Rankings

Appearing in the top position of the search engine results is the main objective of all the search engine optimization activities. Search engines consider various factors to rank a website in search results. Site speed and HTTPS are the important factors to get placed on the first page of search results.

Though most of the search engine marketing experts have knowledge of the factors that affect the search rankings, many still have some confusion on which is the right option. They end up targeting the wrong factors and keep on struggling to reach the top position.

Here are the two important ranking factors that we have to focus:

• Dedicated IP address that affects the page speed

• SSL certificate that ensures the safety of the website

1. Impact of Dedicated IP address on search engine rankings

First, we should confirm with the hosting company what type of IP address has been assigned to our website. Basically, there are two types of IP addresses:

Shared IP address, which is used to host multiple websites

Dedicated IP address, which is a personal IP address for any website

Everyone should clear about that dedicated IP address will not boost rankings, but it helps to improve website loading speed that contributes in the rankings. As site speed is a key factor for ranking in search engines, you should go for dedicated IP address.

A dedicated IP address is the best option for websites that get more traffic. A shared IP address will be used by a huge number of other websites too, which will result in a regular server crash and website downtime, thus making your website unreachable to visitors, which will affect your SEO.

2. Impact of SSL Certificate on Rankings

An SSL certificate has more importance for an e-commerce website and the businesses that collect personal information from the customers. Basically, SSL certificate is a security token online companies use to protect private information circulated on the web. E-commerce websites use this feature to win the trust of the customers. 29% of customers look for the green bar or lock icon before providing personal information. This green bar or lock icon comes with an SSL certificate, which increases trust and increase in sales and conversions.

Besides security for the owner and trust of the customers, SSL certificate also helps the businesses get top rankings. In August 2014, Google announced that HTTPS will be regarded as a ranking factor in search engine results, thus this being the most important benefit of SSL certificates.

Getting on the first page of Google’s search results needs a lot of hard work, tools, and advanced strategies. It is important that you have a fast dedicated hosting server and an SSL certificate for the security of user information.