Let’s face it, the web features a lot of content that we’d all do well as users to mistrust. As people with an interest in using the internet to shop for goods and services, we know what we like to see and what we don’t. Trust is probably one of the most important SEO tools at your disposal.
Trust is really at the heart of our endeavors on the internet. We all know that since there’s no face-to-face communication we are, to a greater or lesser extent, at the mercy of unscrupulous users. So, having said that trust is vitally important, what are some things you look for in a site. What are the things that make a site ‘trustworthy’ and how can you translate these factors into good SEO?

The most basic thing to consider might be that although people are by nature more or less trusting than others, we all generally trust the big name search engines to deliver some good results when we conduct a search. These days it would be both disappointing and surprising to click on any of the top ten results and find a poor and irrelevant site. Having asserted this, good SEO can be seen in context as absolutely crucial.

In order to maintain a good client base, search engines work hard to maintain high standards when it comes to rankings for their results pages. With this in mind, gaining their trust and in turn that of users involves understanding the methods they use to determine your popularity and relevance. Learn the ways in which so-called robots sent to probe sites relay information and what precisely they look for. Learn how you can include text files which talk directly to them, and be sure to make the most of the opportunity. With trust in mind, choose a good and reliable search engine optimisation company. If you can’t trust them to give you the best advice about good practice, you can’t trust them to create a site that’s optimal in the long term.

Earning general trust among users should be a higher priority than learning about the specifics of search engine algorithms. Good ranking is based largely on popularity, and it’s through gaining the trust of users and providing a good service that popularity can be attained.

It’s not only malware that revolts users. Unacceptable sites can simply be boring or insubstantial. It takes a while to earn a reputation as trustworthy in terms of good content, quality links and a high level of service, but it takes only a second to lose it. SEO services will tell you that every aspect of SEO is ongoing. High standards need to be achieved and also maintained of your users are going to trust you.

A basic guide to ways in which trust can be cultivated among users would probably highlight the following factors:

Users Trust Sites On Which They Can Participate in Active Discussion

Feeling involved nurtures a sense of trust, and website can get users involves by leaving ample room for comments and feedback. Such feedback can be useful on many levels and these days a site that doesn’t allow for user participation can be seen as lacking something essential.

Users Trust Sites They Use to Get Information for Personal Use.

If you think about the type of information on a site, there are varying degrees to which the information can be said to be useful on a personal level. Information which is used and talked about and valued is what should be present if users are to trust a site fundamentally.

Users Trust Sites Where They Purchase Goods or Services

The interaction involved in transactions is likely to encourage trust among users. One the transaction has been completed the user can feel a connection to a site that extends beyond the purely commercial.

Users Trust Sites they Visit Often

Regularly visiting a site and finding high standards and reliable information maintained leads users to trust sites as dependable. The personal touch is usually attained through hard work in that it’s only constant attention that will allow you to be thorough. Think about social media sites such as Facebook, and how effective it’s been in getting users to trust its pages. Think of how you might employ social media marketing to benefit from the success of sites such as that one.

In conclusion, as far as trust is concerned, it’s wise to go with your instincts.

It’s not always possible to spot a bad SEO company. Even if you’re on the lookout for the signs that indicate a company is not as up-to-standard as they should be, it’s possible for people to slip under your radar. Bad SEO does sometimes happen to innocent websites, leaving their owners wondering what to do to repair things.

Bad SEO, or black hat SEO, can have a long-term effect on a site. If someone has managed to get into your pages and place hidden text or other frowned-upon techniques, you might not know about it until your ranking takes a dive. Once that happens, the damage has to be found and repaired before your site can even be submitted for re-inclusion. After that, there is still a wait for your rankings to go back up again.

Why does black hat SEO have this effect?

Black hat optimisation techniques have this effect because they deliberately break the rules. When the search engines eventually pick up on this rule-breaking, they punish the site that features the bad techniques – in other words, you are the one who has to deal with the outcome.

The time lag comes from the short-term effectiveness of black hat SEO techniques. For example, paying for or hacking into thousands of good-quality links can artificially boost your link profile. This can convince the search engine algorithm that your site is suddenly popular. Over time, however, as the algorithm investigates the origin of these links, their real nature may be revealed. If it is, the search engine may either automatically filter out your page, or a harsher penalty may be imposed.

Not all rankings drops are necessarily the result of black hat SEO. The term ‘black hat’ indicates a deliberate misuse of optimisation techniques. While there are companies out there that use techniques in this way to produce swift results, enabling them to lure clients in and be gone before the rankings drop occurs, sites can also be subject to simple bad SEO. It might be that a helpful but misguided staff member has performed some optimisation on your site, or that an uninformed web designer has offered to include some search engine optimisation techniques in their design. Bad SEO can come from well-meaning people, but it doesn’t make things easier to repair.

Discovering the problem is half the solution

The hardest part of recovering from the effects of bad SEO is figuring out what went wrong in the first place. The search engines don’t send an email informing you of your infraction. In fact, even discovering that something is wrong can be tricky.

Once you realise that something has gone wrong, it’s important to check through your site carefully. If you’re really stuck, it can be well worthwhile getting a search engine optimization expert in, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Tracking down the problem can require extremely close examination of all your pages. Once you discover the problem, it’s a matter of fixing it and applying to the search engines for re-inclusion.

In the corporate world, it has always been difficult to manage the reputation of a firm. For instance, it has always been far from simple to maintain the kind of image which impresses consumers favourably. However, the inherent difficulties associated with image maintenance have only been added to by various developments which have made the situation what it is today. These interconnected developments have had the largest impact on online firms.

Globalising Business

Although globalisation is in part driven by multinational corporations and the development of the net and despite the fact that capital accumulation has been enhanced by this shift in many instances, globalisation has not only been uneven, but it has also thrown up new challenges for reputation management. For example, a brand name which is effective in one culture can be offensive in another. Similarly, advertisements which deliver good results in one nation may wholly fail somewhere else.

The Evolving Net

The net has become a more complex environment over time. Despite economic ups and downs, online firms have become more sophisticated in their selling of goods and services. They have hired search engine optimisation outfits in the battle to get higher rankings in the search engine results pages. However, these firms have sometimes performed unethically and users can be suspicious about excessive manipulation of the search engines. Using the wrong SEO firm is easily done, but it can have negative implications with regard to reputation management. Negative comments about a firm can feature high up in the search engine results pages if the correct guidance is not sought.

The Emergence of the New Social Media

The emergence and rise of the new social media has given businesses new opportunities. However, some firms have lacked the expertise to exploit the vast audiences on Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, users of these social networking sites are hard to tempt by traditional marketing methods. In addition, the new social media give disgruntled consumers every chance to air their complaints. Some large and established companies have proven very vulnerable to unexpected attacks in this environment as a consequence of poor internet reputation management. At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk, we have the expertise to ensure that a firm is not successfully ambushed on this new front.

The Review Problem

It is a great idea to encourage interactivity on a site. It can really develop the community ethos of a firm’s site which means that it can move towards the authority status which is the ultimate goal of many online strategies. If users are contributing their own content, if they are making comments, if they are submitting reviews, something very positive is taking off. However, a clumsy response to a negative comment or a hatchet-job of a review can be counterproductive in the extreme. It may be a deliberate provocation by a rival, or it may be a customer who lives to complain, but the kind of response which makes it abundantly clear that composure has been lost can be verging on the disastrous.

Doing reputation management independently can be a big mistake for a new firm. It takes time to gather experience in this sensitive area.

When setting up a website and thinking about optimising it for SEO, it can be useful to consider all those aspects which tend to lead to lower search rankings and make sure they are avoided. Then, the hard work put into making a site succeed will not be diminished by negative factors that may have been overlooked.

Content is hugely important for a website’s success, both in terms of visitor satisfaction generally and search engine optimisation. Having dull content, with nothing really to say and stuffed full of keywords, will discourage visitors from returning to a site. The overuse of keywords will also be picked up by search robots with negative effects, and the website’s search ranking will fall.

Having very little content is also problematic. Visitors will not find much to interest them on such web pages, and search engines will mark them down as being sparse and therefore of poor quality. The solution for a site that lacks content is not to copy from other places online, as duplication is particularly frowned upon by search engines. Unique content is called for in order to perform well in search rankings, and if a number of identical pages are discovered by search crawlers they will discard all but one, with no guarantee that that one will belong to one’s own website. If there are numerous cloned pages within the same site, crawlers waste time investigating them all and can miss other, perhaps more important, content altogether.

It is particularly crucial to avoid any duplication of titles, as, out of the whole page, a title holds the most weight for SEO. Lazily copying the same text for the titles of a series of pages is likely to lead to being poorly rated by search engines, and the same goes for the words used in Meta descriptions.

Linking to poor quality sites is very detrimental to search engine optimization, especially if such links are numerous. This provides a reason for regularly updating one’s links, as businesses can fail and websites may be taken over by dubious companies one would never wish to link to normally. The practise of buying and selling links in order to improve one’s position in search rankings is risky because it goes against Google’s guidelines, and there is the possibility of your website being banned.

Something which can have a great affect on a website’s perceived quality is its hosting. Choosing a reliable hosting company is vital in order to make sure web pages are available at all times, for visitors and search robots. If servers are continually down, resulting in a site disappearing from the web for long periods of time, then search crawlers will not be able to index all the pages easily, and the website may be marked as being of poor quality, quite properly as it is unable to provide a constant service to visitors.

At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk, we not only optimise your website for search engines but also correct any negative factors for you.

Professional search engine optimisation services often get frustrated when they see SEO companies who obviously know little about what makes up a good internet marketing service snatching up customers who should know better.

An eye-grabbing marketing hook doesn’t mean a company is going to do your internet marketing any good, but these days, it’s too easy for low quality “search engine optimization” firms to buy their way onto the front page through Google Adwords. These are usually bristling with “once in a lifetime” offers, that “guarantee” you a top place on the rankings at suspiciously low cost.

No reputable SEO company will ever make promises like this. There are only two ways that search engine optimisation services can guarantee a top place on the Google rankings. This is by black hat (i.e. spamming) methods, which cheat a site up the rankings, or via the same pay-per-click marketing methods they themselves are using.

Neither of these will work for long. Google gets very wise, very quickly, to sites that spam their way up the rankings. They not only get penalised, they can get permanently banned. This is exactly the opposite of what an online reputation management company is about. As for Adwords, this is fine for short-term use (many reputable SEO services actually advise this technique, for sites that are newly launched and therefore faring poorly in the rankings) or for long term use on particular keywords that a good SEO firm will advise you upon, however, unless you’re prepared to pay a lot of money, most sites will gain more traffic cheaper from SEO.

The truth is, a lot of these so-called search engine optimization companies are based in foreign lands where it’s almost impossible to get your money back. They offer false promises they have no intention of delivering on. They are five minute wonders with short-term domains, who quite often earn a living via “special offer” 5-day trials in which they charge an absurdly low sum to spam customers’ bank account details.

As the customers have willingly given these details out online, they have little or no hope of getting their money back from the bank when they see mysteriously large amounts disappearing from their accounts. The service which, once they looked at it more closely, they had no intention of extending beyond its 5-day trial has somehow become a regular commitment that doesn’t even allow the option of direct debit cancellation. It’s a practice that’s rife on the internet – unfortunately, people still manage to fall for it.

So, how do you know when you’ve found a search engine optimization company that’s reputable? A sure-fire way to tell the good from the bad is to see if those who advertise their way up the rankings do equally well if you Google the word “scam” after the company name.

Another good pointer is if the SEO company has contact address details in the UK. It’s not fool-proof, as scam companies can buy UK addresses from abroad – but it helps.

In an attempt to reach the top spot in search engines, you can go one of two ways – ethically or unethically. While unethical, or black hat, SEO, may seem like it gives quicker results, it’s never going to pay off in the long run. White hat search engine optimization is far preferable, but just why is it so important to use ethical techniques?

Well, ethical techniques not only improve your search rankings, but they also improve your credibility. Credibility can have an enormous impact on the overall success of an SEO strategy, just as it can have an impact on the business as a whole, and it can be one of the primary ways to reach and retain the top spot.

Doing everything by the book means that search engines will take a liking to your site, and with no penalties you’re more likely to reach the top. This increases traffic and also increases the likelihood that customers will trust you as well – if the search engines think you’re credible, customers will too.

Unethical SEO, on the other hand, is one of the quickest ways to get you blacklisted. Utilising techniques such as keyword stuffing will never go down well and often results in the site being blocked, so although a lot of people assume that high keyword density will mean instant results, it often means exactly the opposite.

Ethical techniques also make it a much more pleasurable experience for the web user. Seeing content that’s filled with keywords never amounts to enjoyable reading, and rather than seeing what you’ve got to offer visitors are more likely to close the page and keep searching. It’s much wiser to insert keywords naturally into the content, appealing to both web crawlers as well as the users themselves.

Building credible links with other websites is another important, yet ethical, way to raise your profile, and can be invaluable in helping to improve your search rankings. Quality inbound and outbound links are always picked up by search engines, and forging mutually beneficial relationships with other businesses or websites is an added bonus.

The importance of ethical SEO is just as important when it comes to the social networking scene as it is anywhere else. People often think that they can use the social media arena as an easy way to advertise their company, so may choose to update far too frequently or post their links on every related site that they can. This is certainly not adhering to best practice codes, and will often be construed as spamming. This will get you blacklisted as quickly as keyword stuffing, so always take the time to cultivate successful social networks to have the most effect.

As you can see, it really is important to use ethical SEO techniques. Doing so will give a far better outcome and will enhance your credibility, and this can be invaluable in forging successful online reputation management practices. Remember to always use white hat techniques and give the black hat a miss – unless it’s for Halloween, of course.

If you are using search engine optimization to help promote your website and have decided on which of the various SEO techniques you want to use to achieve your goal then you can start to implement them.  However there are certain pitfalls and not all SEO advice you may receive will be good advice – especially if you are going the DIY route and looking for information online, so before you start, you should always check to see if you are using SEO correctly and if you are following the guidelines which search engines such as Google set out to help you stay on the right side of ethical.  The way you approach your search engine optimisation campaign will speak volumes about your business and you need to be doing it the right way in order to acheive your online reputation management goals and bring SEO success.

Non-ethical Behaviours

Some website owners commit ‘SEO sins’ without realizing that they are doing it. If you are not sure what would be considered to be unethical (or black hat) with SEO and the use of keywords on your website, there are some common examples of what to avoid doing and to be safe. One common behaviour that is considered unethical with SEO is a process called keyword stuffing. This is when a website owner places their keywords everywhere they can, in content, meta tags, images etc. Search engines are now able to detect keyword stuffing so, even if you try to hide it somewhere on a page on your website, such as behind an image or by using the same colour text as background, it could be noticed.

Another common type of unethical behaviour with SEO is cloaking. This is when you present one form of content to the search engine and a completely different one to the users of your website. This can be avoided by making sure that whatever it is you submit to the search engines, you are backing it up with providing that same information on your website. You can check what Google sees to make sure that the page is saying what it should be to both user and search engines by using free online SEO tools.

Keep It Safe

When you are doing anything with your site, including SEO, try to consider ethical behaviour in all of your actions online. If you are telling the search engines that a link goes to a specific product and page, make sure that you back that up with actually having the right content and SEO keywords on the right page. Taking the time to analyze your website to make sure that you are using SEO correctly can make the difference between getting good search engine rankings and getting booted out of the search engine results altogether if you get it wrong. If you are not sure if a particular marketing method is using SEO the way it should be, consult with an expert offering comprehensive search engine optimization services before you place the ad or submit it to a search engine.

Usually, if you are unsure if whether a method that you are going to use could be ethical or not, you should probably trust your instinct on it and not use it. If still you are unsure whether or not you should proceed with the ad or listing, consult with someone else who is familiar with the correct use of SEO and can help you decide if you need to change something to keep it ethical and not risk you getting booted out of the search engines. Consult with an ethical SEO company who can help you decide if you should use it.

Be Respectful

The key to ethical SEO is to show respect not only the search engines for the job that they do, but also respect the users that are going to be on your website. You do not want users to get the image of your business or website as being unethical or spammy or more conerned with search engines than them.  Your website is the representation of your business. You want users and search engines to see that you are using SEO correctly and that you are operating a respectable business online. Don’t give off the image that you are trying to do whatever necessary to get the SEO keywords into your website and that you don’t care about how it reads or the message that it delivers. Getting good search engine rankings is important but if you don’t use SEO correctly and practice behaviour that is not considered to be correct online, your users are going to be able to see it along with search engines and all of your internet reputation management efforts will be in vain.