Is Your Site Trustworthy?

Is Your Site Trustworthy? Simple Ways To Boost The Trust Factor That’s Becoming More And More Important For Ranking

If you did an audit of various websites, you’d quickly see that not every page that does on-page SEO well also ranks well. They may have chosen keywords wisely and optimized their content for them. Yet still, they are buried deep down in the search results while other sites rank with the bare mention. You must always ask and then answer the question “Is Your Site Trustworthy?” when thinking about search engine optimization on websites.

One of the main reasons is the trustworthiness of one website over the other and there’s a lot you can do to make sure you measure up. Show the search engines and just as importantly your readers that you have a website that can be trusted.

Install a SSL certificate. You want your website to be accessed through the more secure https protocol. Speak to your host about getting this installed and what steps you need to take to make sure your entire site is converted over. Most hosts have a fee for the certificate, though some of them will offer it as part of their standard package.

Improve your website’s load time and make sure it is mobile accessible and responsive. These technical details are becoming more and more important when it comes to ranking well. If you don’t get this right, you’re almost dead in the water. If you are using WordPress to run your site, choosing the right theme will go a long way towards helping you accomplish this.

Add privacy policy, terms of service, and FAQ pages to your website. Not only will the addition of these pages (and making sure you link to them from each page on your site), signal credibility to the search engines, it will also show your visitors and potential customers that you are serious about what you’re doing. This adds to the Is your site trustworthy? goal you’re always pursuing.

Social signals are another important part of trustworthiness. We are social creatures who look to others for cues on who we can trust and who we should avoid. Set up social media profiles to go along with your site. Build your audience there and share your best pieces of content regularly. As others like, comment, and share, your credibility will start to go up.

Last but not least, work on credible content and only try to get links to your site from credible sources. It may be tempting to go on sites like Fiverr to buy traffic and links, but it will likely do little good and hurt you in the long run. Instead, build that reach and those links organically and over time.

Boost Your Authority And Make Sure Google And Your Users Take You Seriously
As soon as you start to learn about search engine optimization, you’ll hear about site authority. Usually right after you learn about keywords. And for good reasons. It is one of the big factors of how well you will rank for anything on your entire site. Let’s look at what you can do to boost your website’s authority.

Internal And External Links

The most basic sign of authority is the one that was first implemented in the birth days of Google. The idea was that as people find high-quality and helpful content and link to it the cream will rise to the top.

While things have changed since then and a lot of safety measures are in place so you can’t scam your way to the top by buying links, your site authority is still largely determined by the quality of natural, high quality incoming links.

How do you get those? By sharing great content and getting the ball rolling by telling your target audience about it. How do you do that? Social media is a great option, which also brings us to my next point.

Social Signals

Once you start to get the ball rolling on social media sites, others will start to share your content. Guess what. That gives you incoming links and it sends what are called “social signals”. As your post about your latest blog post or article get shared around and liked, your content and with it your site gain authority. This will build over time, as will the last thing we’ll talk about.

Website Age

Age will also help you as time goes on. The best time to have registered a domain was ten years ago. The next best time is today. Get started, get high quality content up, start sharing it with the right audience and your authority will start to grow as time goes by. Don’t obsess or worry over the age factor. It is what it is. Building search engine traffic takes time and not just because of the age factor. Instead, continue to work on your site, knowing that ranking will become easier as time goes by. This is in part because of your website’s age and authority, but also because you have more content on your site that will rank for a variety of keywords, and as you grow your audience they will help you spread the word, creating more social signals and incoming links for you.

Editor’s Note: Be sure to register your primary domains – ones that include your name, your brand, or something else you identify with, for example – for five years or more. When Google and others stop by your site, this is something they make note of that must not be overlooked.

This is not an extensive list of what improves site authority. There are lots of different factors involved in it in addition to this. Search engines are deliberately vague about what moves the needle at any given time. That said, these are the ones that are most in your control and what I have found to help most. Ask “Is your site trustworthy?” on a regular basis for optimal results for your business.

I’m a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, an independent publisher, and serial entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you’re new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my training on how to sell yourself at Sell Yourself and Your Stuff and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.