Tips for building trust and influence of your website

There are several aspects to Google’s Panda update, but one thing is certain: Google is concerned with signals of trust, influence/authority, as well as real branding. If you own a website or business, what steps can you take to send Google these signals?

Here are a couple of ideas that work.

Indulge in Public Speaking
When you are a public speaker, Google will see it as a signal that your source is trusted as well as authoritative - having nothing to conceal. Your business name and domain on the web are signals to Google that you are speaking. It doesn’t matter where you are speaking – industry conference, community college seminars etc, there will always be a page that lists who is speaking. Usually, such pages will provide you with a link. The citation of your domain counts anyway, whether or not you get the link from the platform you are speaking from. So, you are not wasting time researching and preparing for those quality talks you deliver, it pays off well.

Blogger Linkup
This is a daily email newsletter. Each day, there is email going out of blogs seeking to get guest posts, as well as bloggers searching for sites that would accept them. Well, the entire truth is that this doesn’t generate desirable response at times, since a good number of the sites seem to be somewhat dodgy – so consider it critically before showing your commitment. One of the mighty errors with a good number of guest articles is the repeated use of same bio box. This results in unnatural focus on inbound anchor text. Ensure that you do not form part of this mistake.

HARO – Help A Reporter Out
Have you heard about Help a Reporter Out? This is a daily email list of reporters searching for experts in different industries that would interview or quote for stories project. Obviously, you may not stumble on a request from big name magazines and dailies such as the New York Times; however, there is still high value placed on up-coming dailies and magazines, or industry-specific journals and magazines.

Press Releases
If you are regularly doing things that are press-worthy, it is likely you are sending out press releases about such things. An example of press-worthy event is creating science project PDFs for an institution. If you happen to get a guest blog post related to the project, don’t forget to link to it or mention it there. This way, you can maximize content that you spent a lot of resources on (money, time). Now, you do not need to bother about link equity passing of the press release - just see the links as directions or pointers. Once people stumble on your press release and click on your link, search engine will definitely index them. Thus, it is recommended that you place up to two deep links on your press release.

Consider Educational Links
rnSpeaking generally, educational links known as .edu sites are seen as having more trust and are more authoritative compared to any other site. One of the best ways to generate links from educational sites is to create valuable and relevant content or project to .edu websites. If you are not skillful enough, pay a high profile writer to create a valuable content that would attract the attention of professors, teachers and top professionals. Place the content on a special template and do not include any ad or commercial links – if possible, turn the content into an encyclopedia. Make the content downloadable by putting it in PDF format.