Search Engine Optimization: What Constitutes An Authority Site?

This post was written by Internet Marketing John on August 25, 2010
Posted Under: Search Engine Optimization

It is important to know what constitutes an authority site if you are interested in achieving a top position with the search engines.

Linking to authority sites make the job of attaining a higher search engine results page (SERP) ranking much easier, than to websites that have not already achieved this status.

Achieving authority site status is what we should all be striving for if you are an owner of a business website.

Some websites that have not undergone search engine optimization are already authority sites, but are not recognized as such by the search engines.

Websites that either lack sufficient content or enough links, are normally not considered authority sites by the search engines.

Authority websites normally dominate the top ten results for the highly competitive, high traffic keywords on most of the search engines.

Except for a very few exceptional sites, the search engines usually smile favorably on websites they define as authority sites and reward them accordingly with the top rankings.

When it comes down to exactly what constitutes an authority site; several things come to bear.

Generally, authority sites have quite a bit more content and web pages than other websites.

Search engines love content rich websites and feed on them. Websites that are loaded with a lot of web pages that are filled with a lot of content per page, generally do much better with the search engines than a smaller website with only a “tickler” paragraph on each page.

Links from other authority sites to your website, will help your site become established as an authority site.

The search engines will give more weight to incoming links from authority sites that have the same or similar main keywords as your site, than inbound links from other less established websites.

Now that you know what constitutes an authority site; you can go about establishing your site as an authority site.

Here are three things you must do to move things along.

Add more pages to your website.
Add more content to your webpages.
Find some authority link partners that are willing to link back to your website.

It sounds easy, but it takes a lot of time and work to achieve authority site status.

Before you jump in and start adding more web pages to your website; do some research to find out why your competition is beating you out in the search engine rankings, so you can take appropriate action.

You can usually get some good ideas by checking out your competition to see what they are doing and how they are doing it.

When you know what type pages you need to add to your site; go ahead and either write some additional content yourself, or outsource the task to a copywriter or ghost writer.

If you know how to incorporate keyword rich text into your content, you can do it yourself. Otherwise, delegate the work or hire someone to do it for you.

The web is loaded with good “hungry” writers looking to earn some money who do this on a regular basis, or you can go to article exchanges where you can grab content for free, providing you include the author’s resource box which usually includes a link back to the author’s site.

After you have posted more pages with additional content, you need to start soliciting authority sites and get them to link back to your site.

You can solicit backlinks from webmasters by email or by commenting on sites that allow HTML or URLs in the comments section.

Both methods will get positive results when done properly. You will find that some people will answer your emails promptly, while others will not even bother to take the time to respond.

The better your website looks and the higher quality content you provide; the more likely authority sites will consider linking to your site.

After you have uploaded more pages with quality content to your site, and have acquired at least 10 authority links back to your website; you will need to make sure that your web pages are properly optimized for the search engines.

Once all these steps are accomplished, you can resubmit your website to the major search engines and web directories so that their robots can crawl your site, re index it and move it up in the rankings.