To submit your certificate request to Verisign, visit http://www.verisign.com/products/site/secure/index.html. Choose from either a 40-bit or 128-bit (recommended) strength certificate. Follow the steps to easily submit your request and pay online. At the time of publishing this article, a 128-bit SSL certificate was USD $895.

Within one week, you will receive your certificate via email. To install your certificate, load the Internet Information Services snap-in, right click on the site that requires the certificate (this site should be the same site used to generate the certificate), and click on properties.

When the property pages dialog loads, select the “Directory Security” tab and then click on the “Server Certificate…” button. This will load the same certificate wizard that we used to request a certificate, however, as you will notice, this time the wizard will allow us to process our pending certificate request.

Click on the next button. Select the “Process the pending request and install the certificate” option and click next. You will now need to enter the filename of the certificate that was provided by Verisign, as part of your confirmation email. The wizard will load and process the certificate. Lastly, a certificate summary is displayed. Click next to continue. Lastly, click on the finish button to complete the certificate installation. Your certificate is now ready to test.