There has been an ever increasing awareness to the value of Google’s “TrustRank” algorithm. While there are many factors that are “Off-page”, there are a number of simple actions you can take to make sure your site earns the trust from Google by employing these easy techniques.

The best way to think about Trustrank is to compare it to if you were to purchase a product or service in the real world. There are many built-in factors that we use to pre-qualify a business to see if we are willing to part with our cash for their goods or services. This is the same approach Google takes in order to measure the quality of a site, and doing this will get you out of the so-called “Sandbox” much faster than the typical 4-6 months.

While in no particular order, some are most costly than others, but all are worth doing.

• Register your domain for 10 years. If you can’t afford the $70 it costs at GoDaddy then are you really serious about your site?
• Buy a SSL certificate - this tells Google that you are a legit business since they know you have to have a verified checking account to get a SSL cert. (And buy it for as many years as you can at a time, at the very least for 2 years)
• Have a privacy policy that tells in exact detail what happens to the information about the visitor that is collected from the site.
• List a mailing address (no P.O. Boxes) - Just as in real life, you feel better purchasing a service or product from a place that has a physical location.
• List your contact information - telephone, fax (if needed), email & name.
• If you have a bigger budget, use any of the “Hacker Safe” services and place those icons on your site. Again, this tells Google that you are seriously committed to protecting your visitor’s experience on the site.

Those are simple techniques that you can directly apply to your site, and are signals to Google that you take your online presence seriously.

As far as the “Off-page” factors, it’s really about linking to quality sites that are relevant and sometimes considered “authority sites” by Google. Also, getting links from those trusted sites will help re-enforce the quality of your site in the eyes of the Google spiders.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com