Part 4: Is your site trustworthy?
Alongside the factors within your website that can improve your website rankings, there are a number of external influences which also impact the SEO performance of your website.
How popular is your website?
The popularity of your website offers you an insight into what you are doing correctly or wrongly to attract visitors to your content and encouraging them to return again. You can monitor popularity using analytics information to assess the amount of traffic which is visiting your website on a regular basis.
The popularity of your information can also be understood by finding out which sites are linking into your content and assessing how popular those websites are.
You can also compare the popularity of your website against your competitors. There are a number of third party services to help you analyse the competition.
Is your website Trusted?
There are a range of attributes that commonly determine whether a website is trustworthy or not. Untrustworthy sites are websites which appear to promote spam or malware and can become blacklisted as unsafe by DNS-BH or Google’s Safe Browsing API.
Ways to avoid your website getting blacklisted include:
Avoid excessive keyword stuffing: Keywords should appear naturally throughout the content and work to inform the reader about your services or products. Unnaturally high keyword densities are flagged as spam.
Don’t hide text or make it invisible to users: Hiding content by making text the same colour as the background makes the content readable to search engines but invisible to viewers.
Ensure that you do not have a ‘cloaked’ website: A website which uses cloaking presents a different website to a user than is displayed to the search engines based on IP address.
Test your linked sites for trustworthy status: You can test the trustworthy credentials of your website by using an analysis service such as McAfee’s SiteAdvisor. Although you may have created a perfectly trustworthy site, the websites that link into you may be giving you a bad reputation if they are not playing by the rules.
Attract trusted links: You may also wish to attract high quality links into your webpage from sites that are values for their trustworthiness.