Working toward making your web site more credible can potentially produce a number of benefits, such as gaining more advertisers and/or customers, enhancing promotional cooperation with other web sites, or persuading more readers of a particular belief. Here are some useful suggestions for making your site more credible…

1. Try to gain links to your site from other web sites, preferably those which are viewed as credible and legitimate. People seeing these links, especially if they frequently see links to your site, will begin to feel that it is more credible.

2. If your site provides a service, such as web hosting or design, look to see if any previous customers have put positive reviews of the service elsewhere on the web. If so, provide links to these reviews; testimonials on the website can be somewhat effective but aren’t as credible as positive reviews on pages outside your control.

3. If the website has many customers, consider making a message board or forum which they can use to ask questions about the products or services you have provided. If potential customers can see you (or your employees) solving current customers’ problems it makes the website appear more credible as well as letting them know that other people have thought it best to purchase from you.

4. Having a professional appearance/design is helpful in making a site more credible, along with updating any outdated information and keeping the copyright date (if it has one) current; this will also prevent the website from appearing as if it might be “abandoned.”

5. Consider placing “badges” from other credible, well-known web sites on the site if you qualify to use them. These include such badges as “PayPal Verified”, “Trust Worthy Web Site Certification”, a Google PageRank indicator (use this if the site’s PageRank is high), or various web site award logos. If your web site has an eBay or Amazon seller account with a good feedback rating, consider making a link to it.

6. If you have a telephone number and/or address associated with your business or organization, making them available on the website will inspire confidence that potential customers or advertisers will be able to contact you if necessary. A mailing address specific to your business also makes it seem more credible and established.

7. Don’t link to other web sites which are considered questionable by many people, such as schemes offering massive amounts of income or conspiracy news sites. Even if you feel one of these sites offers beneficial content, the perceptions of most people and the possibility they will associate linked web sites should be kept in mind.

8. Using secure (https) transfer of data (if the web site requires personal information, especially financial) will increase the cost of running your web site (unless your hosting service already includes this capability), but is useful for making it appear more credible, especially if a badge or line of text is used to advertise its security.

Applying one or more of these tips should help your web site achieve greater success by inspiring more confidence in its credibility among users.

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