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How to Make People Trust Your Blog: 4 Features of a Reliable Website

Trust seals, professional design, relevant high-quality content, and overall performance are all important features of a reliable website that you need to understand well. The reason for this is that those are the features that your blog must have in order to engender public trust.

There is a simple reason why you should do everything possible to gain trust from your readers. There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the Internet and only 13% of bloggers make over $1,000 a month. If you want not only to be one of those 13% but to get closer to top-earning professional bloggers, you have to create a website which people will trust and respect. Without credibility, you will be able to motivate neither subscribers nor advertisers to invest in this business venture of yours.

4 Features of a Reliable Website That Your Blog Must Have

1. Trust seals and security certificates

In this age of burgeoning cybercrime making your website as secure as possible is a necessity. Showing off this security to the people who visit your blog isn’t a necessity, but it’s what you should do if you want to foster trust. Having an SSL certificate (HTTPS instead of HTTP) doesn’t even rate a mention because it’s a must-have for any blog that wants to have a chance of a high Google Search ranking.

According to an Econsultancy survey, the most trusted seals are McAfee, PayPal, and Verisign. Any business would also need to provide a seal from the Better Business Bureau or a similar organization in its country.

Of course, if you only run a basic blog without an e-commerce store attached, you can skip a few of these otherwise important trust seals. But showing that you are secure from hackers is still a very smart and beneficial move.

2. Professional design

There are a variety of psychological tricks you can use to make your website more attractive and you can apply some of those ideas to make it more trustworthy as well. Professional design is one of the must-have features of a reliable website because the people of today are conditioned to trust in products of top-grade quality.

If you can’t afford to hire a professional web design agency, you should consider hiring a freelancer or using one of the professionally-developed Word Press themes available for sale at various specialized marketplaces.

Opt for minimalistic design as it always looks clean and more professional. It also makes it easier for you to direct your visitors exactly where you want them to go and enhances the impact of powerful visuals.

3. Top-quality content

It would be reasonable to argue that content is the most important of all the features of a reliable website. It’s definitely so for a blog in particular because there your value is measured by the quality of your content.

To create posts worthy of trust you need to make sure that they are:

• Truthful.
  You must provide ways to verify the information you speak of, such as links to reputed sources and a reference list under every post.
• Well-written.
  The quality and style of the writing also matter greatly. Every piece of content you post must look like a work of a professional and a talented enough writer to keep the readers engaged. The same goes for any visual type of content, like videos, info graphics, and images.
• Readable.
  While a writer’s unique style is important, it’s also essential to make every post easy to understand. Use apps like Hemingway Editor to evaluate your content and determine how to simplify it to boost the readability.
• Mistake-free.
  Of course, even the best post will look unprofessional if it contains grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. Be sure to proofread all items of text several times and use Grammar to eliminate all mistakes.

Speaking of the visual quality, this should be considered one of the key features of a reliable website. Today you can use stock image databases, like i Stock to obtain professional pictures for free or at very affordable rates. There is no excuse for any business to use poor-quality images on any of its published material.

4. Performance

One of the most important features of a dependable website is a thing you cannot really see, but that your blog visitors can definitely feel. This is the performance of the website itself. It is determined by both the quality of your hosting and your website design.

Performance includes page loading speed, adaptability to mobile devices, and up time. This means that these are the factors you need to pay special attention to. The web hosting service you use will have a huge impact upon performance, so you should always invest in the best you can afford. It is also imperative to move from shared hosting as soon as you are able. Shared servers are not secure or reliable enough to sustain a popular blog, or indeed a blog which aspires to be popular.

Visuals are the factor that will most affect the page loading speed from a design perspective. Therefore you will need to use specialized apps to optimize photos and videos without compromising their quality.

All in all the features of a reliable website boil down to professionalism, so you will need to make your blog professional if you want people to trust it.