We often advise on how to gain trust in our website reviews, and I've compiled a list of some of the advice we've given over time. Of course, trust can be earned in more ways than this, but we'll give you these seven to start with.

1. Use clear and normal language

This is an often overseen issue that causes a lot of misgrief with your visitors. You should speak their language, not drown them in a sea of technical specs you don't even understand yourself. Use a clear and direct style of writing. Keep your audience in mind. Do not focus on telling them what you want to tell them, focus on providing as many arguments as possible why their quality of life improves after buying that specific product.

2. Testimonials

Do not brag about your products yourself. If your products or services are really that good, I'm sure you'll find someone else that can do the bragging for you. Make sure your visitor understand that the testimonial is written by an actual customer, by listing at least name and company and if the customer agrees, even a picture of him. Video seems to be the next big thing in testimonials, by the way. In my opinion, that video testimonial should be accompanied by a written excerpt:

Testimonials as seen on cloversites.com

3. Verified signs

Everyone can create a verified sign, so don't let those verified signs fool you. But the majority of your visitors actually believe that you are the 'Most appreciated hairdresser of Mississippi' or the 'Best Plummer 2006'. Man, I hate those signs. But when the signs are from well-known companies, they really do add value to a webshop:

"Verified" signs

By investing in the guidelines of the right verification companies  the webshop shows that it has been keeping the customer in mind when setting up the website.

4. Pictures

If you recognize the woman on this picture, please call the following toll-free number...:

You can do better than that stock photo. Listing actual pictures of yourself and/or your employees pushes conversion due to recognition and identification.

5. List your physical address

This one is really simple: people want to know there is a place to go to in case of problems (if any). Having an actual store next to your webshop works even better, especially if a lot of your customers are relatively local.

In the Netherlands digitalstreet.nl made this concept into a huge success, even though they're located in the south-west of the Netherlands (quite near to where we are), people come from all over the Netherlands because they'd rather buy the product in the store. There are more stories like that, but even if you don't want to do that, just listing your address on check-out pages increases trust a lot.

6. What happens after check-out?

There's this hesitation in almost all buying decisions: right before you click the Pay Now button. What's going to happen next? Am I charged for taxes, import, anything else? Can I select a wrapping paper? Explain what happens after clicking that button. That way the customer is included in your ordering process and there are absolutely no suprises. That can be done with just a few short lines of text:

7. Show you care about more than making money

The most important thing is that your website has to reflect your believe in the product or service you provide. Just a list of products is not enough. Also tell your customer about your company, your main values or mission statement. I really love the 1% for the Planet from Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) and Craig Mathews (Blue Ribbon Flies) http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org. Next to showing that you are involved, it also creates a huge sympathy and trust factor.

We'd love to hear your tips!

If you are selling products or services on your website, you must have thought about this subject. I'm curious: What have you done on your website to increase trust? What are you going to do?

7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust is a post by Michiel Heijmans on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

However, the use of microformats, a set of agreed upon HTML conventions used to describe content, can give you more control of the snippets displayed in Google SERPs. Once your site is properly using rich snippets, you will see them also appear in your Google custom search and Google site search results, so this technique is definitely worth exploring if you use those tools as well.

The changes are easy to implement for WordPress, Magento and other software, let's take a look at some use cases based on hReview, hCard, hProduct and XFN:

Businesses & Organizations

Could be marked up as follows:

<div class="vcard">
   <span class="fn org">L'Amourita Pizza</span> 
   Located at 
     <div class="adr"> 
        <span class="street-address">123 Main St</span>, 
        <span class="locality">Albuquerque</span>, 
        <span class="region">NM</span>.
     </div>   
     <span class="geo">
        <span class="latitude">
           <span class="value-title" title="37.774929" />
        </span>
        <span class="longitude">
           <span class="value-title" title="-122.419416" />
        </span>
     </span>
   Phone: <span class="tel">206-555-1234</span>
   <a href="http://pizza.example.com/" class="url">http://pizza.example.com</a> 
</div>

Learn more about the business and organization markup at webmaster central.

Products

Could be marked up as follows:

<div class="hproduct">
   Brand: <span class="brand">ACME</span>
   <span class="category">Heavy objects</span>
   <h1 class="fn">Large all-purpose anvil</h1>
   On sale for 
   <span class="price">$99.95</span>.
   <span class="description">If you need an object to drop from a height,
   the classic A23859 anvil from ACME is the way to go.</span>
   <a href="http://anvil.example.com" class="url">Anvil details page</a>
</div>

Becomes:

Learn more about the product markup at webmaster central.

People

Could be marked up as:

<div class="vcard">
   My name is
   <span class="fn">Bob Smith</span>,
   but people call me
   <span class="nickname">Smithy</span>.
   Here is my home page:
   <a href="http://www.example.com" class="url">www.example.com</a>.
   I live in
   <span class="adr">
      <span class="locality">Albuquerque</span>,
      <span class="region">NM</span>
   </span>
   and work as an
   <span class="title">engineer</span> at
   <span class="org">ACME Corp</span>.
   My friends:
   <a href="http://darryl-blog.example.com" rel="friend">Darryl</a>,
   <a href="http://edna-blog.example.com" rel="friend">Edna</a>
</div>

Becomes:

Learn more about markup for people at webmaster central.

Reviews

Could be marked up as:

<div class="hreview">
   <span class="item">
      <span class="fn">L’Amourita Pizza</span>
   </span>
   Reviewed by <span class="reviewer">Ulysses Grant</span> on
   <span class="dtreviewed">
      Jan 6<span class="value-title" title="2009-01-06" />
   </span>.
   <span class="summary">Delicious, tasty pizza on Eastlake!</span>
   <span class="description">L'Amourita serves up traditional wood-fired   
   Neapolitan-style pizza, brought to your table promptly and without fuss. 
   An ideal neighborhood pizza joint.</span>
   Rating: 
   <span class="rating">4.5</span>
</div>

Learn more about markup for reviews at webmaster central.

Interested in getting started? Well there's no reason not to start using microformats as much as possible already; semantic markup is always good for search engine optimization:

1. Update your markup (make sure it's valid) and use the Quix bookmarklet to check your page, by entering 'snippet' to submit the current page to Google Rich Snippets test tool.
2. Getting the “Insufficient data to generate the preview” error? Then make sure that there are no errors in the markup (go back to step one) or check that you are using enough data to generate the snippet preview, so check the microformat syntax again.
3. Finally, let Google know that you're an early adopter.

So who's using microformats in this and other ways? Brands like Mashable, Yahoo!, Yelp, Technorati, SearchMonkey, LinkedIn, Urbanspoon and many more. If you're interested in digging deeper into the future of microformats as they relate to web analytics as well, Dennis Mortensen from Yahoo! has a great post on what the future may hold.

Google & Microformats: Drive More Traffic is a post by Frederick Townes on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• My buddies at Conversion Rate Experts released an article on their blog today which really rocks: Understanding your visitors.
• Bloglines apparently fixed their "Crawler problem", according to their news page, and that boosted the RSS readership for this site from 4,000 something to 4,637!
• I'll be on Dutch Business News Radio this thursday, talking about the online marketing methods used in the American elections. For you Dutchies: read more about the show here.
• Bryan Eisenberg did a great round up of Google Analytics plugins, hacks & tricks.
• Aaron did an incredibly thorough roundup of all the issues around SEOmoz's Linkscape, and gives an incredible load of advice in the process.

Btw, check out this screenshot I made of Google Analytics with the first tool mentioned in the article on grokdotcom: the Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics.

Useful Link Roundup is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

"Us" is a group of highly experienced web marketing consultants. Some of you, especially the Dutch people, might know Ton Wesseling, and of course you know me.

Now you'll ask: what can we offer you?

• An expert review of your site
• Workshops in online marketing (given by Ton and me together)

In both cases, you've got the rare chance of getting not one but two (!!) online marketing experts helping you to make (more) money online.

Expert review

In the expert review we will review your entire site: starting with usability and functionality, up to how you are persuading your customers to buy, and whether your online presence outside of your site needs improving. And best of all, we can do it not only for your site, but your competitors too, revealing your strengths and weaknesses.

Whether you have an e-commerce site, a subscription based site (newspaper, blog, etc.) or a service site, our expert review is sure to give you hands-on tips for improvements.

Workshop more conversions on a lower budget

In the workshop, we'll tell you how to do online marketing in times of recession: more conversions on a lower budget. And we will not only tell you, we will, interactively, create an improved online strategy for you and with you.

Act now!

Both of these are on a first come first serve basis, and since our time is limited, we might be sold out as soon as today, so be sure to react soon by emailing me for pricing & availability details.

More conversions on a lower budget is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

He started out with this statement:

The sole purpose of Marketing: to chance or enhance existing behavior.

And then walked us through different "groups" of people, "throwing" them into three different groups: inner directed, outer directed and sustenance driven, and plotting that along a market development chart. It's way too much to blog right now, but I'll ask Tony if there's a chance that he can put up his presentation on something like slideshare.

He gives some example of sites that are sending confusing messages, talking about products that are interesting only to the outer directed, in a language that will only appeal to the inner directed. He's so right... Jason gives some examples of gambling sites where they have, by looking at them with this method, increased conversion by 1200%.

There's a question from the public about using this in b2b. The answer: you're still targeting humans. Think of which people are buying your goods within those companies, and in which time frame they're thinking: if they're thinking 5 years ahead, don't sell them anything that's aimed at fixing something tomorrow, OR sell them something talking about the next 20 years. He recommended a book about this too: The requisite organization by Elliot Jacques.

Know your customer! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I was talking to Ben earlier and he said "we have actually never worked with a client for whom we haven't at least doubled their conversion rate". You should read their report on 101 easy ways to use Google Website Optimizer.

They quote Greg Boser: "I have just realized how much cash I've left on the table because I haven't dedicated enough time and resources to conversion improvement". I think that´s true for most of you (and me) as well...

Conversion Rate Experts! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!