Trust is everything. If major search engines do not trust your website, it will not rank. If your visitors/customers do not feel your website is legitimate, they won't come back. It is as simple as that. Here are a few quick tips that will help you score points with both: Structure Your Website Properly - A bit basic? Ya, but you would be surprised how many webmasters I come across that neglect a well organized and SEO optimized structure. Make sure your website is free of any broken links, use structured URL's, 301 redirects, etc. How to do this all beyond the scope of this article (perhaps I'll go over this soon), however a quick Google reveals quite a bit. Create a "Company" Info Page - This is a nice little trick I learned last year that has helped me a lot. Even if your website isn't a real company, you should still do it. A nice little "About Us" or "Company Information" page can go a long ways in making your site look legitimate. In fact, most SEO experts believe that a many search engine robots crawling your website are looking for it. Statistically this page is one of the most visited of your entire site. Here are a few tips to maximize your legitimacy: * Make sure there is a link to this page from your websites home page. * You can include a mission statement, company bio, history, what exactly your business/website/blog does, a quick biography about yourself (as owner/webmaster), a paragraph about each employee/staff member, etc. * Have some kind of contact info, such as an email address or phone number. * Photos are a good thing! Visitors are much more likely to come back to your site if they can see it is being run by "real" people. Don't be afraid to put some work into this page, remember on the web your image and reputation are the only things you have. Publish a Privacy Policy - This is another area where SEO experts agree, robots look for privacy policy pages. It is generally good practice to have these anyway, but many people leave this out. Unless you are dealing with a whole bunch of legal business, keep your privacy policy simple, easy to understand, and accessible. Visitors tend to feel better seeing one, even though 99% of them will never read it. If you don't want to do it yourself, here is a great free tool to help you: http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/ Design a Sitemap - Again this is a bit basic, however newbies may have skipped it. Sitemaps are important to both search engines and some users. They provide a very simple and organized overview of your website. Sitemaps also help search engines find pages that are usually overlooked, such as standalone pages (a webpage contained within a site that is not linked to) . If you would like to see a quick example, you needn't look farther than this blog: http://crims0n.us/sitemap If you are using Wordpress, I recommend Google (XML) Sitemap Generator, which is what I use personally. For normal sites I would recommend XML-Sitemaps.com Link Directly, but Thematically - Try not to link to something within your site that is not directly related to what you are trying to rank for. For example, lets say you own a website selling used books, all under different categories. It would not be in your best interest to have a link from your romance novels to you science fiction ones. Although technically they are all "used books", by doing this you are diluting your rankings for both "used romance books" and "used science fiction books" respectively. If you absolutely must link, consider using the nofollow tag so search engines know you are not passing any relevance.That is just one example, but hopefully that puts it into perspective for you. (This was taken from my personal blog, here is the source: http://crims0n.us/seo/5-quick-tips-to-increase-your-sites-trust/ Hope it helps someone )
no offense but don't u think all your tips a little bit too basic to be mentioned here? people do those thing all the time ,DUDE
Hey CrimsoniteX. Good post. Too often I see people focusing on "inbound link strategies" that they forget that all the inbound links in the world won't help much if their site sucks. Gotta build a quality site first. We continue to try to refine our site through AB testing. Every little nudge to improving conversions is a good thing.
Thanks guys I appreciate it. I left out backlinks purposely because I wanted these to be "Quick" tips, and I think everyone pretty much knows that backlinks are vital. This was meant more for the newbies who may have missed something that could give them that extra push in the ranks.