How You Can Build Trust and Authority to Your Website and Get Higher Ranking

Do you know that almost 25% of the Google Ranking Algorithm is calculated by the trust and authority of your domain. 

So your next question would be – can I do something about this? And yes you can. So are you ready? It’s much more than just the age of your domain.

How Google calculate the ranking of websites

Trust and the search engines

• Domain age is very important. I am sure you know about this. And there is not a lot you can do about this. But when you are choosing your server, you should choose one with a good reputation, so you don’t have to move your site to another server after 6 months or 1 year.
• Registration information. You can see my registration here. There is in general more trust to a public registration than a private registration. So a .Gov or .Org name will have more trust than a .Biz or .Com.
• Physical address. Write your physical address on your site – this will also help your trust by your viewers.
• Privacy policy. If you have any web form where you are collecting data you should have a well written privacy policy and use some secure data transfer (like SSL Certificate) and tell your viewers that you are using it. If you see my web form – you will see that it says “We respect your email privacy” and you can read more.
• FAQ page. A FAQ page will also help you increase the trust of your site.
• Who links to you? The search engines will check the links to your site and check where they are coming from. The principle here is that if they are coming from spammy domains, the search engines might think of you as a spammer. On the other hand if Google discovers that you have links from trusted domains such as Wikipedia, dmoz or yahoo directory or other websites with a high PageRank, Google will think your site must be trusted too. So in short – if you have a new site like me (www.SeoCustomer.com is only 6 months old) and you only have very few links to your site, and most of them are spammer links, you might get in trouble.
• Who do you link to? It’s the same idea as a link coming to your site. If you link to spammy sites, the search engines might think of your site as a spamming site too. So be careful who you like to.

Domain Authority

This is a more straightforward concept than trust. The most important element is how many quality pages link to your website and how do they link to your website.

First let me show you this Google Authoritative from www.chrisg.com. Click on it and take a good look at it. Very informative. Use it as a reference map. I love it. Click on it to see it large.

Many people believe that Google has a whitelist of trusted web sites. So if you can get some inbound links from websites which are on this list, it will give you a boost in your search engine rankings.

I am not sure about this whitelist – but anyway if you get inbound links from websites with a high PageRank you will do well.

Other Link Factors

• Theme – what is the subject of the domain that links to you – is it relevant topic for your subject?
• Strength – is the site that links to you trusted?
• Diversity – do you have a few varieties and diversity of domains that links to you or many
• Age – how old are the linking domains?
• Location – the location of the inbound links – from the content or the footer?
• Anchor Text – Google will love a lot of different anchor text. If the different sites use the same anchor text Google will think it’s suspicious.

You can check out your backlinks, anchor text and follow or no follow at www.backlinkwatch.com. Great tool.

Okay guys… Did I forget something? Let me know…

Free Marketing Giveaway
Remember to grab the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011 and 2012 Q1. 180+ pages with tips and tricks about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building.

Have a great day out there… Time for my coffee 🙂
Henrik