Trust is a vital component of any website, regardless of its nature. Sites with e-commerce facilities often focus on making the transaction areas of their site secure, but overlook the need for trustworthiness throughout the rest of their site. Other sites ignore the issue completely.

Trust, when it comes to your website, involves not just reassuring your customers that their financial information will be secure but every aspect of your interaction with the site’s viewers. People are increasingly aware of the damage an untrustworthy site can do to their computer, their credit and their personal security. If a viewer feels threatened by your site, they will navigate away from it and never come back.

Appearance is important in the creation of trust. It is perhaps more important than any other factor. If a site looks clean, and has a few indicators of trustworthiness such as contact details, viewers are likely to stay. Keeping the design of your site clean has an enormous psychological effect on your viewers. Keeping it uncluttered, with well set-out advertising (if your site features ads) will also create the feeling that the site has nothing to hide, such as malware.

Contact details also help build trust in your viewers. Providing contact details means that a site is approachable when things go wrong, such as when an order is late or a credit card is overcharged.

A privacy policy is essential in building trust with your site’s viewers. Your privacy policy should be clearly visible if your site asks for any personal information from visitors. Your other policies pages should be kept near this page for easy access. Your policies page will work best if it is written using clear wording, with your company’s formal wording included at the bottom if required. This means your policies page can also be a place where you can include some of your keywords to further optimise your site. Contact SEO Consult for advice on how to organically work keywords into a clearly written, trust-promoting policy page. Linking to your policies from your home page and commerce pages is a good idea.

If you sell products, clear, good-quality photos will help your viewers see exactly what they are buying. Professional shots are good, but don’t use a mix of professionally taken shots with low-quality images. Use photos that actually resemble your product. This may sound obvious, but many, many sites lose trust this way, or by displaying photos that are far above the design quality of the rest of the site.

Other, smaller things add to the apparent trustworthiness of a site. Spelling mistakes and broken links give the impression that the webmasters don’t really care about their site, and by extension don’t care about the site’s viewers.

Managing the trustworthiness of your website is about doing a lot of little things, rather than one main thing. In this way, it’s much like search engine optimisation, requiring a whole-site common-sense approach. Trust can be lost in a moment, and can take quite some time to build, but is essential for continuing traffic to your site.

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