Some people say the mysterious Google TrustRank is what really determines SERP positions on result pages. It was obviously created to decide how trusted a website is by looking at various factors including security and the length of time a domain has been around on the web. They have never made an official explanation on this and have never spoken of it. However, there is no doubt that there are two elements that determine trust; user perception and trust ranking.

If you’re serious about website design or online business then this should be your number one priority. If not, you shouldn’t be looking too far into the future of your empire because you won’t be able to build up good relationships with leads or customers.

Why is It Important to Build Trusted Relationships?

Well first of all, you’re probably going to lose more than 80% of your potential buyers because the internet is well known for scams and spam. People don’t like to take a chance, especially when the online market is so competitive. The other reason is your best mate Google – if Google doesn’t trust you, people won’t find you, and if people can’t find you then there’s no point in running an internet business at all. Becoming a trusted site in their eyes will not only make you more visible to the online world, but to many others too.

How to Build Trust with Search Engines and Visitors

As mentioned earlier in this article, there are two main factors that will affect your business relationships, user perception and trust ranking. User perception is how a visitor understands a site in their eyes so doing the following will help gain trust quickly:-

Blogging – Shows visitors that you are posting quality content on a regular basis and talking about relevant subjects to keep them interested.

Tweeting – Shows that you are active, especially if you post tweets every couple of hours which is what you should be doing with Twitter anyway.

Quality – People will trust you if it looks like you put time and effort into making your site look stunning as well as professional. It should be tested by humans for humans and have a good user experience. Make sure everyone gets a great first impression.

Being Real – Make sure you have a telephone number along with other contact details including an address if there is one so people know your business is real.

Simply put, people who have had bad experiences with dodgy sites are careful about the sites they trust and purchase from.

The second element is TrustRank, the unofficial set of factors that determine how trusted a site is by using sophisticated algorithms affecting the Search Engine Ranking Process (SERP) rankings:-

Legal Issues – In the EU, you must have a Privacy Policy explaining how cookies are used and handled if they are collected. People have seen better positions in search results by placing the policy link in their footer.

SSL Certificates – This is a definite factor for online businesses. Major search engines can tell how trusted a site is by a Trust Authority. Companies such as VeriSign provide secure and trusted certificates with EV (Extended Validation – the green bar that appears with the HTTPS in the URL) features which is instantly recognized by visitors, spiders or crawlers.

Domain Age – Even if you use paid services to hide WHOIS data, its been said that Google can see the actual data anyway so the data should only be hidden if really needed. The age of a domain name can show that you’ve been around a while and it can be a good idea to have at least 10 years registered on it.

Links - The sites that link to you and the sites you link to yourself can tell a lot about an organization. It not only determines your PageRank, but if you have links to sites Google may consider spam or junk, it can affect your authority too. Make sure all your links are of good quality and are completely relevant.

There are other factors, but Google will probably never tell us. An interesting fact is that TrustRank was actually registered by the corporate giant in 2005 along with a patent to go with it. So it’s definitely real and it could mean more to the SERP than PageRank. Give it a try and see if it makes any difference because it’s definitely worth it.

West London based freelance web designer Sohail Amir, providing bespoke web design and development solutions.

Getting website traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo has to be part of your Internet marketing plan mainly for three reasons:

1. It is high quality traffic. (After all, these visitors searched using your best keywords!)

2. With good ranking you can get a lot of this traffic passively.

3. It’s free! I’ve received literally millions of visitors from search engines over the years.

This article will show you how to start your own flow of traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It all starts with a little SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It consists of strategies to help your web pages rank better in the search engine results pages (serps) for a particular search word or phrase.

SEO can be a complicated subject which is why there are so many freelance consultants and internet marketing companies offering SEO services. Some of them are quite expensive, charging thousands of dollars to get a site ranked in the top ten for your particular niche keywords.

However, if you are running on a tight budget and can’t afford to hire a professional, you can do SEO yourself. Just follow the nine SEO strategies below. Most of it is fairly simple, it just takes time.

(When building new sites, I like to do everything myself except steps 7 & 8 below which I prefer to outsource.)

1. Choose Your Keywords Wisely

When you are planning your website’s content, you should do some research about which keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that people use to find websites in search engines. Think carefully about your target audience and consider what they might type into a search engine when they are looking for websites like yours.

You can use tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help you with your research. When you are starting out, aim to have a list of five keyword phrases that you will optimize your website for. Once you are ranking well for these five, you can add more keywords to the list.

When using the Google Keyword tool, use the “exact match” option so you know how many people are searching for the exact terms you’re researching. The best keyword phrases to optimize for are keyword phrases with 1500 – 5000 monthly searches. Those keywords usually have just enough searches to be profitable, but not so many that the competition is too stiff to outrank.

2. Use Your Keywords in the Title Tags of Your Web Pages

A web page’s title tag is one of the most important factors for how that page will rank in the search engines. Each page at your site should use a title tag that matches the search term you’re trying to get the page ranked for. This is especially important at your main page. The title tag should also describe the content of the page in a concise and accurate manner. This helps the search engines decide how relevant the page is to a particular search term. The more relevant a page is, the higher it will rank in the results for that search term.

3. Use Your Keywords in Your Domain Name

I’ve done a lot of research on this and even though not everyone agrees, I have found clear evidence that websites with exact match domains get top ranking easier than non-keyword domain sites. In other words, once you know your best keyword phrase for your niche, see if you can get the domain name that matches that phrase exactly. Go for .com then .net, then .org. If none of them are available, use a hyphen (-) between your best keywords.

4. Use Your Keywords in the HTML Heading Tags

Heading tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.) give the search engines more info about how relevant the web page is to certain search terms. Make sure to use heading tags containing your keywords at each page of your site. As a bare minimum, every web page should have one H1 tag that includes the same keywords that are in your title tag.

5. Check the Keyword Density in Your Website Text

The number of times your keywords appear in the text on your web page or blog helps search engines match the content to the appropriate search terms. This is known as keyword density. How often keywords should be used is often debated among SEO experts. Some believe that stuffing a page with keywords is beneficial to search engine rankings, while others think that ‘keyword stuffing’ is viewed as a form of spam by the search engines. As a general rule, for a web page that has about 400-600 words of body content, use the main keyword once in the first paragraph, once in second paragraph, once in the last paragraph, and once somewhere in between.

6. Setup Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure Properly

When you are planning your website or blog, make sure you have at least one text link on every page that links to your main URL. The text link should contain your best keyword or keyword phrase. As your site grows in size, so will the number of web pages that point to your main page, increasing the popularity for that page based on your best keywords. Also, when adding blog posts at your blog, be sure to hyperlink to other posts on your blog when appropriate. (Each time you do this, be sure to use the keywords you’re working at getting ranked!)

7. Grow the Number of Incoming Links from a Wide Variety of External Sites

Of all the factors in SEO, one of the most important is the number of web pages that link to the target page you are trying to get ranked well. In other words, if site A and site B are virtually identical, site A will outrank site B if there are more web pages linking to site A.

Other factors that help are having a variety of links and multiple links from high PR sites. (PR stands for page rank, a weighted value Google gives to pages based on their authority.) If site A has links from a wide variety of places such as social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, niche blogs, web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, article directories, etc., it will outrank site B with the same number of links all from one source.

Of course getting lots of links to a site can be time consuming. That’s why you may want to outsource this task. You can do so at odesk.com, guru.com, elance.com and many other places. Just be sure to hire link builders with a good track record and lots of positive feedback. Also be sure to instruct them properly and let them know you need links from a wide variety of sources, and have them apply
strategies 8 and 9 below.

8. Grow the Number of Incoming Links From External Sites Slowly and Consistently

Don’t go too fast with your link building campaign. Getting a few dozen links a week or even 10 a day is OK, but if Google sees 1000 new incoming links to your site the next time they update their database, you’ll likely move down the serps, not up.

9. Use Your Keywords in as Many Incoming Links as Possible

While you don’t want all the links to your site to use the same keyword or keyword phrase, you do want to focus on using your best keyword or keyword phrase for most of your links. Remember, SEO is all about proper site setup and link building. If the top ranked web page at Google for your best search term has say, 200 incoming links, you can outrank that page when you get 201, provided you have all or most of the other strategies explained today in place as well.

In closing…

Internet marketing can be inexpensive if you do things like SEO and email marketing yourself.

If you use all of the SEO strategies shared in this article, you will improve your ranking in the search engines. Depending on the niche you’re in, you could go right to the top of the serps within a matter of months!

Get more do-it-yourself strategies like these from Jim Daniels at http://www.bizweb2000.com – he’s been making a living online since 1996 and can show you how to do it too.