MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

“Authority site” status is generally earned over time, and through much effort. Usually the top 10 results on the search engines are loaded with authority sites, as search engines smile favourably upon these sites and reward them with top rankings. It needn’t matter if a site has Google’s trust, if it is respected and trusted by the peers within your niche, then it will become socially labelled as an authority site.

One of the best ways to gain the trust and respect of your peers is to spend a fair amount of time communicating with other like-minded people in your particular industry. Join forums, comment on blogs, and soak up some industry knowledge as you gradually find ways to give back to the community. Once you feel you’ve gained enough knowledge, share it with newcomers who may benefit from your advice.

Build relationships by helping others, answering questions, and guiding others towards the expert knowledge they seek. All these efforts will help you develop name recognition within your community. By participating in your niche’s society and sharing the knowledge you have gained, trust and respect will naturally follow.

Personality is also an important factor to consider. Sharing your knowledge should be done in a personable way, in order for your peers to gain the trust and respect that you have worked so hard for, and not lose it. If your peers don’t respect you, your site may receive occasional traffic due to link bait strategies, but your services won’t be highly sought after. As I recently read in an article, “Weak and unworthy authority gets in the way of grasping the truth.”

Authority websites tend to be content rich and have many more pages filled with keyword-related content in comparison to other sites, as search engines feed off these two factors. Another factor that plays a defining role in your status is whether other authority sites link to your site. If authority link partners are willing to link to your site, the search engines tend to give more weight to these incoming links, provided their main keyword is the same as yours.

The more accurate and relevant the content and better the design of your website, the greater the likelihood of your peers linking to you. The last step is to make sure that your pages are accurately optimised for the search engines. Then it’s time to re-submit your website to the major search engines and directories so that they can re-index the website and move your site higher up in the rankings.

This is not a process that happens overnight. Authority sites achieve their status when they are perceived to be a trusted, respected authority site within the community. The benefits of this authority are that they begin receiving links to other authority sites and the opportunities open up with regards to the success of their services or products offered. Ultimately, this makes SEO goals much easier to accomplish.