A few years ago I started a website and to my delight, the SEO efforts I was making to grow it were yielding results. However, one day I checked my rankings, and got the shock of my life. It had fallen, and badly.
I was doing my SEO right and I felt that was enough, but I didn’t know there was more. I hadn’t paid attention to my website security, and I didn’t even know that it mattered when it comes to Google and its ranking factors. Also, there were other security concerns I wasn’t paying attention to. As far as I was concerned back then, it didn’t matter since I had good content.
Obviously I was wrong, and I now know that if you really want to rank higher and increasing your site’s search traffic, then you need to understand that there is more to it than just building links and churning out more content. Understanding Google’s algorithm and it’s ranking factors are crucial.
Currently, Google has over 200 ranking factors[1] they consider when they want to determine where to rank a site. And as expected, one of them is about how protected your site is. According to them, website security is a top priority[2], and they make a lot of investments all geared towards enduring that all their services, including Gmail and Google Drive, use top-notch security and other privacy tools[3] by default all in a bid to make the internet a safer place generally.
Unfortunately, I was uninformed about these factors until my rankings started dropping. Below are four things you can do to protect your site.
Four steps to get started on website security
1. Get security plug-ins installed
On average[4], a typical small business website gets attacked 44 times