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I hate to break it to you, but the online audience doesn’t trust you. If you’re trying to get new customers through your website, building website credibility is the key to your online success. Online shoppers are skeptical by nature, and for good reason. They don’t know who you are, and the internet is full of fly-by-night companies and scams. Below are some tips on how to check website credibility trustworthiness.

What can you do to earn their trust and website credibility? Here are 7 of the top ways you can build credibility through your website and earn that sale.

1. Include quality real testimonials on websites — Customers don’t trust you, but they do trust their peers. So, when other customers rave about how great your services are, people will take notice. Feature testimonials on your website, and make sure the testimonials include at least a photo of the person each is from (video is better, but not always easy to get).

2. Offer a money-back guarantee — One of your customer’s biggest fears is that he’s going to lose money by doing business with you. By offering a money-back guarantee on your products, you put his mind at ease, letting him know there’s a way out if he’s unsatisfied with the purchase.This eliminates the risk, and helps ease the customer toward making the purchase.

3. Highlight your experience with an About Us page — Too many companies overlook the importance of their About page. They view it as an afterthought or a throwaway page. The truth is the About page is actually very important for building trust with customers. Not only does it let them get to know you better, but it’s also a good way to highlight your experience and present your company as established and reputable.

4. Post your contact information on every page — Customers need to know that you’re easy to get in touch with. They want the reassurance that if something goes wrong with their purchase they’ll be able to get in contact with you for resolution. Be easy to contact, and post your contact information on each web page of your website.

5. Share your expertise on your blog — People trust experts, and they feel comfortable doing business with them. Use your blog to position yourself as an authority in your field. Share your knowledge and show customers that you know your stuff better than anyone else in your industry.

6. Have a professional web design — First impressions are everything, and if your website has a cheap, spammy-looking design, you’re going to scare off a lot of potential customers. The truth is people do judge based on looks, so it’s important that your website design for your business need to look professional.

7. Double-check your copy for typos and errors—If your website is littered with misspellings, poor grammar, and other mistakes, no one is going to take you seriously.

A lot of people have trouble writing tiny ads for their   AdWords campaign. They can’t succinctly give searchers a reason to click on their ads and do business with them. Or even worse, they don’t give much thought to their AdWords copy, cranking out generic copy that just doesn’t get results.

Simply put, most AdWords copy I see sucks. Why? Here are 7 AdWords copy mistakes.

1.    It doesn’t include keywords at all—You need to   include keywords in your ad’s headline, copy, and display url. These keywords will be bolded in the search results, causing your ad to stand out a little more. It also lets searchers know that you have what they’re looking for.

2.    There isn’t a call to action—A strong call to action can snap searchers out of their passivity and give them direction for when they visit your website. Keep your call to action simple. “Get a free quote today” or “Call for your free consultation” are examples of clear, effective calls to action.
3.    Where are the benefits?—Customers are selfish. They want to know how they’ll benefit by doing business with you. Highlight your main benefits in your ads. Will they lose weight fast? Increase their income? Save more money? Clearly explain the benefits of your product or service in your ad.
4.    The copy is boring—You need to use powerful words in your AdWords copy. Words like “free”, “guaranteed”, “new”, and “save” can grab searchers’ attention and motivate them to click on your ad. Ditch the jargon. Use strong words. It’s that easy.
5.    You aren’t testing different ads—The worst thing you can do is to pick a single ad and stick with it. You have to constantly test different versions of your ads to see which ones perform best. By making minor tweaks, you can clearly see which changes boost your click through rate.
6.    There isn’t a USP—There are 10 organic search results and several paid search results on each page. Why should someone click on your ad instead of any of the other results? Your ad needs to let people know what makes you different. Follow these tips for creating a strong USP.
7.    Ignoring your display URL—Every little aspect of your ad has an impact on your click through rate. I’ve seen many cases where changing the display URL has helped the ad earn far more clicks. Try placing the target keyword in your display URL as this can help your ad stand out a little more and catch the searcher’s eye.

What other AdWords copywriting mistakes would you add to this list?

When visitors drop by your landing pages, what happens? If you’re making any of these deadly mistakes, they probably aren’t converting. Instead, they’re backing out of your website, and you never hear from them again.
Here are the top 7 landing page mistakes to avoid.

1. No strong headline—As soon as someone clicks on your landing page, they should see a strong, benefit-rich headline that lets them know they’re in the right place and they stand to benefit by doing business with you. Simply put, your headline needs to be strong enough to get the visitor to read on. If it lacks a benefit or is unclear, most visitors will instantly back out of your site.

2. Content buried below the fold—According to a new Nielsen study, web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. This means you need to place your most important information above the fold so visitors don’t have to scroll down to see it. Put your most important benefits up top as well as your call to action so visitors know what you offer and what they need to do next.

3. No call to action—Speaking of the call to action, if you don’t have one, you’re screwed. How can you expect visitors to take action if you don’t tell them what you want them to do? You need to have a strong, clear call to action that guides the visitor to the next step. I recommend placing one call to action in every screen view so that visitors always have a way to take action, no matter where they are on your site.

4. Too many options—It’s a myth that customers want choices. Landing page case studies have shown time and time again that offering too many options actually overwhelms visitors and causes them to take no action at all. Ideally, there should be just one thing you want visitors to do, but having two options (e.g. different packages) is also acceptable.

5. Nothing that builds trust—Online shoppers are a skeptical bunch. If they’ve never heard of you, they won’t trust you at first. Your job is to eliminate risk and to build their trust. You can do this by featuring customer testimonials, guaranteeing satisfaction, and offering a good return policy.

6. Paths guiding the visitor off site—How can you expect visitors to convert if you’re dropping links that take them to other pages? You don’t want to give landing page visitors a way out. Everything should be guiding the visitor toward conversion. Anything that does otherwise is like a leak that lets conversions seep out.

7. Difficult to scan copy—Online users tend to scan content in an F-shaped pattern. This means you need to make your copy easy to scan. You can accomplish this by using bulleted and numbered lists, short paragraphs, subheadings, and bolded phrases throughout your copy.

There’s one more thing I’d like to add. The key to continually increasing your landing page conversion rate is to never stop testing. You should always be tweaking various aspects of your landing page and testing them side by side to see what else you can do to get more conversions. The second you stop testing and experimenting is the second you get stagnant and stunt your future growth.
What are some other deadly landing page mistakes you’d add to this list?

You probably already know that quality back links are the currency you need to earn Google’s trust and to achieve higher search engine placement. But how do you get them? Despite the fact that most SEOs say link building is their least favorite activity, getting quality back links might be easier than you think. Here are some tips to get your link building campaign started.

• Give testimonials for products and services you enjoy—As businesses continue to look for ways to build trust with their online shoppers, a growing number of websites are publishing testimonials from satisfied customers. Is there a product or service that you really enjoy? Submit a testimonial to the company with your name and a link to your website. There’s a good chance they’ll place it on their website and give you a quality back link.

• Guest post on other blogs—The benefits of guest blogging are numerous. First, whenever you have a guest post published on another blog, the blog owner will give you a link back to your website (tip: Try to use keyword-rich anchor text in these links). But guest blogging is about more than just link building. It also exposes you and your company to a new audience, and it helps position you as an expert in your field.

• Get interviewed on a podcast—Like blogging, podcasts have significantly increased in popularity as they’re an easy way to engage and inform your target audience. No matter what industry you’re in, you can rest assured there are dozens (even hundreds or thousands) of podcasts dedicated to it. Reach out to the owners of these podcasts to see if they’d be interested in allowing you to share your expertise with their listeners. Once again, this will earn you a back link, and it will establish you as a leading expert in your industry.

• Have your press releases picked up by quality outlets—With the advent of free press release publishing sites, every company can easily publish press releases online. If optimized properly, these press releases tend to rank well, and they can be effective for link building. But you should also set your sights higher. Don’t just settle for having your press release published on a free site; try to get it picked up by well-respected news sources as well. A link from a major newspaper or trade journal will be of far higher quality than one from a press release distribution website.

• Examine your competitors’ back links—If you’re looking to launch a link building campaign, it’s only logical to see what the competition has done. Analyzing your competitors’ back links is as simple as going to Google and typing “link:www.yourcompetitorssite.com” Chances are, you’ll find they have links on websites that you can get a link from too.

• Submit your posts to blog carnivals—Blog carnivals are essentially online magazines that pull content from the best blogs in their niche. There are blog carnivals on every topic imaginable. Find a blog carnival that covers your industry, and submit your best posts to them. If your post is republished, you’ll reach a wide audience while earning another quality link.

• Look for mentions of your company without links—Have you performed an ego search lately? An ego search is where you “Google” your name or the name of your company. You might be surprised at what comes up. One thing you’ll probably find is that your company is being mentioned on a website without a link back to your site. If this is the case, contact the webmaster with your web address so they can add the link.

Which link building tips would you add to this list? Share your best strategies in the comments!

I’ve been researching this topic quiet a bit and I thought I would share what I have found.  This list is meant to be fairly comprehensive of what the current discussion points are.  This is not a “Live by these rules” list.  If you wish to leave comments to debate these points, real world examples of your experiences would be great. Enjoy!

1.  Hosting on a shared I.P. versus unique I.P.

On shared hosting plans, there could be hundreds of other sites getting their hosting on the same I.P.  Let’s say one of these sites gets flagged as a spammer in Google system – after all, you never know when you are sharing I.P.’s with gambling, porn or pharmaceutical sites.  Guess what?  The I.P. now throws up a flag in Google’s system and your website is on the same one! This can have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings.

2.  Hosting locally versus hosting anywhere in the world.

This one has two schools of thought. Some marketers believe that it doesn’t matter where you are hosted.  There will be no adverse effect on search engine rankings. On the other hand there are those that believe, as Google focuses more and more on personalisation, where a website is hosted will be one of the factors it uses to determine relavancy to each individual searcher.

If you are optimizing a site to a local version of Google; such as UK, it is in some people’s opinions better to register the same country TLD, host the site with a company whose servers are based in the same country and get some quality backlinks from the same TLD sites.

3.  Host using Linux Apache MySQL PHP versus windows hosting.

Linux hosting offers availability of free software, usage of htaccess and mod-rewrite and ease of community support. There is a general consensus on the web that windows hosting is much more restrictive and difficult for webmasters, especially bloggers, who are trying to get the most out of their websites on the search engines.

4.  Buying Year-In-Advance Hosting or more versus auto renewal every few months.

From a search engine’s perspective, buying hosting for a 1 year commitment tells them that you are probably not a fly-by-night spammer. If you plan on trying to achieve authority status in your niche, you might as well pony up 5 years worth of hosting.  That will surely send the message that you are here to stay and most sites are still kicking and screaming 5 years later anyways.

5.  Get Mod-Rewrite / htaccess

Google is funny about duplicate content caused by accessing a domain by www. and the non-www. version of your site. Google Webmaster Account addresses this issue by selecting a preference of either www. or the non-www.

Or

6.  Have your web host provide basic HTACCESS and MOD_REWRITE and write the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]

7.  Make sure your site is hosted on a server with maximum uptime.

This one is a no-brainer.    You don’t want search engine failing to crawl your site because it is down.  They won’t be able to index your newly optimized pages that will cause you to rank higher in search results if your site is down.

Hope this was insightful.