Authority & SEO

By Jamie Faidley Tweet

If you are going to be successful in showing up in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for the keywords that you are targeting you must do three things.  You have to build up the authority of your site, you have to get anchor texts for the keywords you want to rank for to the pages that you want to show up, and you have to develop enough content on your site in order to be able to use internal linking strategies.

With this article we are going to be talking about authority.  What it is and how we can get more of it.  Now the search engines do not come right out and tell you exactly what they look for in an authoritative site, but we have done enough testing to get a general idea of the major factors and it boils down to three: age, links and size of the website.

Age

When you are looking for an expert's advice, wouldn't you consider how long that person has been in the field?  The same goes with giving authority to sites.  Why wouldn't a search engine trust a site about dog training that has been around for ten years, publishing content about dog training, over a site that just popped up yesterday?  If you were looking for a veterinarian for your dog, wouldn't you feel more comfortable taking your dog to a vet who has been in business for 10+ years rather than a young kid just graduating from school?

Incoming Links

If a site knows what they are talking about then other sites are going to use them for a reference and thus, give the site a vote of confidence by including a link from their site.  It makes sense that if a site has a lot of links coming in to their site it would indicate that the content is authoritative for the field.

The kind of links coming into a site matter too.  If you were moving to a new location and were going to have to transfer your dog's care to another vet, would you trust the recommendation of your current vet over the person bagging your groceries?  Same goes with websites.  If you have a dog training site and a dog supply store sends a link to your site, that should be more telling than if a site that recommends web hosting.

The number of backlinks matter, but I think the number of domains linking in has a bigger effect.  Do quality reviews from 20 different people convince you of something more than one annoying friend who tells you how "awesome" something is over and over again?  It should.

Size of the Website

Your authority increases with the amount of content on your site.  The more you know about a topic, the more of it you should cover.  Wikipedia and IMDB are two sites with tons of authority because they have such large sites.  Both of these sites offer a lot of quality information on the topics they cover and they are rewarded for it by the search engines.  If you want to increase the authority of your website, add more pages.

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