Building Your Website’s Trust Flow
If you want your website to rank higher on results pages, it’s important to know how to increase your website's trust flow. Trust flow is a metric based on the quality of the links to and from your website. Citation flow is a measure of the number of backlinks pointing to your site.
Google and other search engines use these metrics to predict how a website might rank in the search engines. However, trust flow is proving to be a more relevant metric according to recent data. Website trust is something that doesn’t appear in a day. It’s something that you must continuously gain over a long period of time, so it’s better you start sooner rather than later.
As buyers of products, you only need to look at your own browsing and buying behaviors to identify the factors that diminish trust. When your trust needs are not met, your once customers often look elsewhere for other suppliers.
In traditional trust-building between businesses, the focus is generally to generate trust via offline face-to-face conversations. But trust can also be earned online where it is often sought before a buying cycle starts, and it's now more important than ever to earn that trust on websites in such challenging and competitive environments.
Imagine a website about golf clubs and other golf equipment, but that website has a lot of links from websites focused on weight-loss products. How trustworthy would you consider that site to be? Sites with a lot of unrelated backlinks are viewed more negatively by users and, more importantly, search engines. Here are a few ways you can build trust with your users using your website.
Improving backlink quality. A few high-quality links can do more to enhance the trust flow of your website than numerous poor-quality links. Focus on building links from authoritative sources within your niche. Links from .edu, .org and .gov websites are also quite powerful.
Guest posting is one way to acquire high-quality backlinks. You could guest post on an authoritative site, or invite someone to guest post on your website. The higher the quality of the other site, the more you’ll see your trust flow increase. You may think that sites such as Wikipedia aren’t trustworthy, but they actually are. Getting your site featured in a citation on Wikipedia can do absolutely wonders for your site’s trust flow and traffic.
Make use of social media. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have high trust and high authority. Create a profile and link to your website. Add a link to your website back to your social media profiles. Be active on social media.
Avoid the mistake of ignoring your website’s inner pages. A natural linking profile will include links to multiple pages on your website, not just the front page. Make sure that your site’s links run deep into your site’s structure.
