With the uncontrolled emergence of Internet spam and scams, users nowadays have learned to be cautious of what they find online.
With the millions of websites – either legit or not – proliferating all throughout the World Wide Web, major search engines have also come to wary of these sites and are now making ways to ensure that they are returning trustworthy and legitimate search results to their users. These major search engines are now ensuring the quality of the sites they are ranking in their SERPs by working to determine a site’s credibility.
Factors to Consider To Measure and Improve Your Site’s Credibility
Traditionally for many years, search engines users assess a variety of factors in determining your site’s legitimacy. Here are some tested factors that can boost your site’s credibility that have been in use for years:
- Inbound Links. Also known as backlinks or in-links, these inbound links (links that lead to your website from external sites) are considered by search engines as signs of a site’s trustworthiness. Inbound Links are considered the virtual equivalent of someone “guaranteeing” for your site. The rule of thumb for this is the more in-links you have from more successful and credible external sites, the better you look good to Bing and Google.
- Outbound links. If the links from your website that link to external sites (out-links) are broken or the external site is irrelevant or outdated, your site’s search rankings can be negatively affected.
- Clean and No Broken URLs. Search engines consider broken URLs, missing images, typo errors and 404 errors as poor signs of a site’s credibility.
- Has User-Friendly Navigation. You must make your site user-friendly so they can easily navigate your site’ s pages and find the information they look for. A difficult-to-navigate site may lead to your site’s bounce rate (the percentage of users who immediately leave your site) to be higher. This would indicate to the search engines that your site wasn’t a successful match for those search queries.
- Website’s Traffic. Search engines measure the amount of traffic to your website. Search engines consider your site more relevant to searchers – thus ranking highly in their SERPs – if your site has more traffic.
- Must be Search-Engine Friendly. In the same way as sites must be easy to navigate for users, your site should be similarly easy to navigate for the search spiders. You must have an XML sitemap as these would act as a “road map” that could lead the bots down each interconnected page of your site, resulting to a quicker and accurate indexing of your page. It is recommended that you have two sitemaps: a text-based list of pages within the sites for users and an .xml file for the spiders.
How Social Media and Search Affect Your Site’s Credibility
With the dramatic rise of the power of social media and search – with Google giving power to its Google+ to directly impact its search results – search engine optimization experts and the like have observed that major search engines have now considered social factors as a ranking algorithmic metric.
As Google and Bing bring social to SEO, creating a new direction for search and for the way how search engine optimisation service providers implement their SEO Compaigns, SEO and social nowadays have become inseparable where social factors and search play a crucial role in boosting site or brand credibility.
Today, users and consumers alike can now easily come across a company or website through Twitter as they can Google. Most significantly, those social media links have become a very relevant and pivotal key in boosting a company’s SEO signals.
Now, with these in mind, website owners must come to recognize and acknowledge the ability of social to affect search results if they want to boost their site credibility.
Tips When Engaging On Social Media and Encouraging Your Friends to Share Your Content:
- Make your Site or Blog Shareable – If you want other people share your content, then make your site or blog easier to be shared by adding social media buttons.
- Encourage them to Share your Content – It’s also a good way to ask people to share your site or blog. Like adding at the end of your blog post “If you found our article useful, then share it to your friends”.
- Provide Interesting Content – If you want your articles/news go VIRAL then you should provide them with something that they would find interesting and useful.
It’s much easier for readers to click one link and instantly share your content than to go to individual social media sites.
Posted by SEO Australia
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