The last thing a legitimate business wants is for their website to be viewed as any form of spam. Not only can this cause a site’s search engine traffic to drop to next to nothing, but if visitors feel the same way, they’re going to leave the site before ever taking any type of action on it.

Since this issue can literally ruin a site for a short or extended period of time, the good news is there are concrete steps you can take to ensure you never have to deal with finding yourself in that situation:

Display As Much Contact Information as Possible: The most common form of spam sites are those with no other goal besides getting people to click PPC ads. While there are plenty of legitimate sites that earn revenue from AdSense or other PPC programs, the difference is they provide value to their visitors. Since spam sites are only interested in attracting clicks, the last thing they want is for visitors to contact them. Not only do they not care, but since they may have hundreds of sites, they want to keep a low profile. A simple but effective way to build search engine and visitor trust is to include accurate contact information throughout your site. In addition to adding your office address to your site’s footer, if you have a business phone number, add it to the upper right corner of your site’s header.

Give Your Content Room to Breathe: This ties into the previous discussion about the standard format of spam sites. Even if you don’t have PPC ads on your site, if every inch of your design is crammed with different elements, people may still end up viewing it as spammy. If your site currently has a cluttered design, simply removing some of the elements that aren’t completely necessary can greatly improve its appearance.

Secure Your Payment Process: While this isn’t likely to cause a search engine issue, if your checkout process doesn’t look secure, visitors are never going to purchase from you. Since adding to your bottom line is the most important function of your site, you want to ensure that every aspect of your checkout process is 100% secure. In addition to having a reliable merchant provider and quality processing system, you always want to convey this security to visitors. That means if your site doesn’t currently have elements like trust seals and detailed FAQs about how you handle payments, you need to add those elements as soon as possible.

Create a Social Media Presence: You don’t have to spend hours on Twitter or Facebook. However, by creating a presence on those sites that’s not automated and connecting it to your site, you can show both search engines and visitors that your site is up to date and maintained by a human instead of a spambot.

Attached Images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source

Jeff Adcock is the president of www.veritransllc.com Which is an online credit card processing company in Houston TX.