9 Tips to Improve Your Website Credibility

As a business owner, nothing is more important than your credibility.  This is also true with your website.  All of the traffic in the world will mean nothing unless your credibility is intact.  Here are 9 ways to improve your website credibility:

1. Promote & endorse credible products, services and business partners.  Make sure everyone and everything you represent reflects the image you want to portray.
2. Reviews, endorsements and testimonials.  Get high quality testimonials and reviews from your clients.  How do you do this?  Sometimes they will offer them up, but many times you'll need to ASK.  Just pick up the phone or shoot out a quick email to customers who you know have had a positive experience.
3. Optimize your content by updating it frequently.  Updating your website with new content keeps the search engine spiders circulating through your site and will place you on Google searches.  Not sure what to add or how to update?  Add articles that will educate your customers or advertise specials of the week.  Keeping a frequent flow of content will help keep you current and credible.
4. Make your website look professional.  Simple aesthetics like easy to look at graphics and fonts are key.  Also make sure it's easy to navigate and looks and feels professional.
5. Organizational Involvement.  Join an association or win an award and make sure you place the affiliated logo on your site.  Visitors like to see those stamps of approval.
6. Get real...cut the hype.  Make sure claims and promises you make are backed up by testimonials, facts, raw data or reviews.  If you can't back it up, don't make the claim.
7. Instill a presence on your website.  About Us and Contact Us pages are very important.  People want to know there is a live person behind the website.
8. Read your own content - pay attention to detail.  Nothing is worse than typos, grammatical errors, misaligned formatting and broken links.  Clean it up - proofread your content and click through the links to make sure they forward properly.  Users like a nice, neat appearance.
9. Less is more.  Don't litter your website with banner ads and classified ads.  Advertising is expected on most websites, just don't let it be the main focus.