Your visitors want many things from you online: ease of use, incentives to act, instant gratification, perfect information, the best price, and on and on.

But one thing, above all else, makes all of these easier: credibility.

It’s a funny concept, that at first seems a bit out of step with all the online jargon out there, but it’s one of the most useful concepts in designing a website to generate sales that we know of.  Why?  I have come to believe it is because these are the foundational principles for creating a successful website.  If you can create credibility, then everything else is easier, and all of the various disciplines in web marketing–persuasion architecture, landing page optimization, marketing automation, search engine marketing in its many forms, social media integration, and so on–require less mind bending effort because you got the fundamentals correct.  In our experience, these are the place to start if you are not getting the results that you want from your website.

Luckily for all of us, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab spent over three years researching the question, What makes a website credible? Over 4,500 participants informed their results, which they have compiled into the following ten helpful guidelines to follow:

» Read more: Creating Credibility Online