To protect customer information, an online merchant will comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Digital Security Standard and, also, use a 128-bit or great secure socket layer (SSL) to ensure that sensitive data passes back and forth between the web browser and the web server. Having taken the steps necessary to secure a payment transaction, online merchants want some way to show their potential customers that they have done everything possible to make shopping secure.

Enter VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro with Extended Validation. First, the service provides 128- or 256-bit SSL encryption, meaning that it offers the most powerful encryption available to protect payment information as it passes between your servers and web browsers. Second, the service provides you with two clear ways to market this to your customers.

Top Notch Encryption

SSL is a protocol that was originally developed to facilitate secure communications over an insecure network.

When a consumer surfs to your website, checks out some products, that consumer has no real way of know if you are who you say you are. You might claim to be reputable, but how would they know?  An SSL solves this problem since SSL certificates are unique to a particular server and domain name. When a consumer’s browser makes contact with the web server, the SSL ensures that your customer knows who he or she is dealing with through a process called public key cryptography. It is used to encrypt data. The other key is private and secret. It is used to decipher data encrypted with the public key.

Next, when a customer sends data over the Internet, which is generally an insecure network, how does that customer know that some hacker is not lurking, and waiting to intercept credit card or account data.  The more complicated the encryption, the more secure the data. VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro offers up the 256-bit encryption. This means that if someone were trying to guess the encryption code it would take that person several billion years to have tried every possible combination.

Recognizable Security Badge

Once a site has been secured with the Secure Site Pro SSL certificate, the site owner gets to display a VeriSign Secured Seal. The seal lets a site owner brag about all of the good work that has been done to ensure that a customer’s data isn’t intercepted or stolen. And seals like this one have a positive effect on sales.

Price

VeriSign’s Secure Site Pro with EV SSL is $1,499 per year if billed annually.

1.) If any of your pages have the same title, change the titles to reflect the content of the pages. This is good for SEO because the search engines prefer pages with different names, and people are less likely to click on a search result if it has a generic title. Avoid using titles over 60 characters long.

2.) Add brief, descriptive “ALT text” tags to your site’s images. Internet users with text-only browsers will see this text in place of graphics. Its good for SEO because search engines can use this text to interpret the subject of an image, giving them a better concept of the page’s content.

3.) Test each of the links on your site to make sure they still work. If any produce errors, either replace, update, or remove them. This is good for SEO because some search engines will downgrade your site’s search ranking if it has too many outdated or incorrect links.

4.) If any of your pages contain information on more than one distinct subject, divide them into separate pages. For example, a page that lists every product a company offers should instead be split into multiple product categories (unless all of the items are very similar).

These SEO tasks can be accomplished in less than 2 hours for many web sites. However, they do not address other important SEO issues like keyword density, META tags, link building, and site maps. If in doubt consult i) an experienced search engine marketing agency, or ii) an internet marketing agency with experience in search engine marketing.