We have written many posts in the past on how to become an authority in your space and we are not kidding when we say it is important for growth. When you become an authority you are viewed in a whole different light from not only your audience but also the search engines. Now, with that said it is not easy to become an online authority. It will not happen overnight and it will not happen from a sub-par web marketing campaign either.

It takes a campaigned thought out approach to build your authority and it requires many different gears spinning at the same time.

Here is a great little video from Bing on what it means to become an online authority:

Trust is something that is very important in today’s online business world. People no longer make purchases on impulse like they once did years ago from random ranking web pages. The game has changed folks and having an outdated website with little to no social reach is something that is going to hurt you as a business when it comes to brand building and online influence.

Trust building is just as important today as is flat out web marketing for your website. If you don’t have trust you simply won’t have long term growth and that is a reality with today’s online landscape.

Here are 20 ways you can build trust to your website

• Great development: Nothing spells trouble like a broken website. Nobody wants to purchase from a site that does not work properly.
• Professional Images: If an image does not fit into a space don’t stretch it to make it fit.
• Spelling: Spelling is always important if you are serious about building trust with readers.
• Professional Design: I understand design is subjective but if you want your web traffic to take you seriously you have to have up to date design.
• Clean URL Structures: Depending on your website coding you URL structures should never trail off the end of the field.
• Testimonials: Whether you sell a service or a product client & customer testimonials will help you build trust.
• Social Links: Your audience wants to see social links pointing to your site. They want to see you active in the social space building your brand and communicating with your audience.
• Consistency: Consistency with your branding and your logo is really important. If you want trust your audience needs to see consistency coming from your brand communication.
• Stability: Search your company name in the search engines, do the results show stability? Do you have positive PR along with social profiles and other trust signals clearly visible?
• Great Content: If the content on your site is compelling and holds the attention of your audience they are going to give your business that much more weight.
• External Sources: Whether it is proactive or the community just likes you it is important to have information on your business in other locations online.
• Live Chat: A live chat feature can often times give your audience a warm fuzzy feeling knowing they can speak with someone if need be.
• Clean SEO: There is nothing worse than trying to read you’re about page and bumping into more links than content. Keep it clean and de-cluttered.
• Show your Face: If you have a team of employees show them off. Online consumers like to know there are some humans behind where they put their credit card info.
• Tell your Story: If your business has a cool story behind it show it off! People like stories especially when it comes to how a business was built.
• Clean Navigation: You want your web traffic to be able to find your internal pages efficiently without any confusion.
• Smooth Layout: The website layout should always lead a person down a path to where you want them to go.
• Remove Pointless Advertisements: If you are trying to sell a brand remove the pointless advertisements flashing and distracting your web audience.

We hear the word “trust” thrown around the online space quite a bit when referring to SEO and web marketing in general in the Google space but very few really understand what it actually means. Trust revolves around strength of linking and what types of online authority is linking directly to you but it also triggers other signals that are important for ranking and overall web visibility.

In this Google Webmaster Video video Matt Cutts discusses how trust works in conjunction with PageRank and other ranking signals.

Google Video About Trust

Being an authority figure in the online space should really be the goal of any website. When you are an authority figure you have the power to socially influence through your actions and words which means you hold a great deal of power & trust in front of your audience. The Bing Webmaster Blog recently put out a great piece on being an online authority which I think everyone should read. Please keep in mind that being an authority figure does not come from slapping together a mediocre plan. It takes though and dedication to put together a fierce action plan.

From Bing:

Everyone wants to be an authority.  Everyone wants to be acknowledged for their, well, knowledge.  Everyone wants the increased ranking and traffic that comes when an engine sees you as an authoritative resource.  But so few actually plan a path to success, thinking instead that blasting everything they find across Twitter and auto-following everyone will boost their numbers and get them recognized as an authority.

Being an authority online comes with huge benefits.

• Increased rankings for individual website pages
• Industry authority
• Heavy online influence
• Increased business
• Immense traffic spikes

Be Knowledgeable

If you are just getting started in your space you are not going to influence anyone overnight. Authority requires seasoning and experience in a space along with being able to present that experience in the right manner in front of your target audience.

Get Active in your Community

You absolutely have to get active socially in front of your community. If you want to be viewed as a leader you will have to engage with your audience on social communities like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You also want to make your website a destination spot that promotes back and forth interaction. (important)

Be a Resource

You want your audience to come to you for advice and help. Once they start turning towards you for help that means they are starting to look at you in a whole new different light.

Encourage Sharing

If you want others to share your material you are going to have to share their material as well. Encourage proactive content sharing so your audience can learn from not only you but from the people around you too. This will allow you to become a central hub which is really the focus of your efforts.

From Bing: (again)

Its generally held that when an engine assigns deep links to the content of your website, you’re an authority.  And while this is more or less true, the engine seeing you as an authority happens well in advance of those links appearing.

As you produce useful content, we try to match that useful content against queries.  If the actions searchers take indicate they are pleased with your content as a solid resource, then we try you again the next time.  This testing happens a lot.  Hundreds of thousands to millions of times, depending on query volumes and content matches.

We watch the patterns of interaction and soon enough, those resources that searchers seem to be particularly pleased with start to float to the top.  We’re not just talking click-through-rates here, either.  We’re talking the entire signal-set that influences ranking at work here.

• Do you have unique, useful content?  Check.
• Do you produce new content frequently? Check.
• Do you have a solid history?  Check.
• Do you have trustworthy links pointing at your content? Check.
• Do you have an active social presence?  Check.
• Do people retweet and like your social content? Check.