Can You Incorporate Trust In Your SEO Program?
Search engine optimization is strategy that uses many variables to get a site ranked as highly as possible within search results. Search engines themselves use a variety of variables, some put it at over 200, to determine where a page ranks in the search results for any given keyword. One of those variables that is often talked about is ‘trust’.
As humans, trust is an emotive variable. We make judgments on the fly based on the information we have and we often include ‘gut feelings’. Search engines don’t have that option. Everything is a mathematical equation that is performed the moment the searcher pushes go. Based on the search phrase used, the search engine will do a zillion calculations and publish the results that mathematically best match the search phrase used.
So this variable trust. What do we know about it and can we incorporate it into our SEO program? Almost every SEO expert will have a slightly different take on what this ‘trust’ factor is. Is it inbound links, bounce rates, time spent on a page or something else? The search engines of course wont tell us.
As I mentioned, it is hard to put a mathematical equation into something like trust. There is one simple approach to take if you want to incorporate ‘trust’ into your SEO – Don’t. When I say don’t I mean don’t think about building trust. Build a good page that is optimized for all the known elements of SEO whilst at the same time including all the elements that a make useful for users.
If users find your page valuable then it will build a trust factor of its own over time. Ultimately, trust is not a factor that goes into determining page rank or search rank. Trust, together with relevance, is the sum of all the variables used to determine those ranks – in others words, trust does not determine rank – rather, the sum total of your SEO is what will determine trust.
Recent Entries
- Why A Search Engine Googopoly Is Bad For The Internet
- Blogging For The Sake Of Blogging Is Not Blogging
- How To Create An Effective Social Marketing Tweet
- Internal Linking – Don’t Be Afraid Of The Long Tail
- Adding Your Scotland Based Local Business To AOL
- Don’t Be Too Quick To Dismiss Google Buzz
- Are Guest Posts A Bad Link Building Strategy?
- Can You Overdo SEO?
- Review Sites And SEO For Scotland Local Businesses
- What Effect Will HTML5 Have On Web Design And SEO