Authority Site: How to Build An Authority Site In 7 Steps

The internet Gurus tell you to write lots of content to attract visitors and increase your website’s rankings in the search engines. This is only partially true because just adding content doesn’t guarantee your content will be found. Your website may contain 1000s of web pages but if no one reads it or finds it in the search engines you will never build an authority site.

The size of your website won’t affect it’s authority in Google or the other search engines.

So what is an authority site?

This refers to a website that contains lots of information on a specific niche. It is the “go to” site when looking for information in that niche. For instance, say you a looking for climbing gear, then your site would include articles, videos, testimonials, a discussion forum, etc related to climbing.

How to build an authority site

1. Create a hierarchical structure

The main topics of your content should be displayed in your navigation bar, then subtopics should branch off from them. For example if your niche is about climbing gear, your sub topics could be climbing shoes, climbing clothing, etc. Your content should only be 3 clicks away from the home page.

2. Add a blog

One of the best ways to keep your site updated is to continually add new unique content to your blog. A content management system such as WordPress easily enables you to build a website that includes a blog within the design.

3. Make your site interactive

One of the major ranking factors of the search engines is how often your content is updated. Regularly updated content gets visited more often by the search engines. For example allowing comments to your blog posts count as an update.

RSS feeds is another way for visitors to interact with your content. Using an RSS reader such as Google reader, visitors can subscribe to your content. Whenever you publish new content on your website they’ll automatically receive it in their RSS reader.

4. Optimize your site to boost search engine rankings

Make sure you include your main keywords in the title, description, keyword meta tags as well as throughout your content. Also include them in your file names, navigation links, image descriptions and internal links.

Make sure your pages load fast by not including too many images, flash or video on your web pages. If your website doesn’t load within a few seconds your visitors will go elsewhere.

5. Build backlinks

The number and quality of links pointing to your site will determine the rate of how fast your web pages will rank in the search engines. Interact with related websites, blogs and forums in your niche by leaving comments and a link back to your own site.

Most website owners only build backlinks to their home page. This is a big mistake. If you want to increase your rankings and traffic link to related posts. This will help strengthen the page rank and link popularity of all your web pages.

Another great way to build backlinks is to write guest posts for popular blogs, submit articles to article directories and send out press releases.

6. Use social media to generate free traffic

Use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking sites to drive traffic back to your website. Install the sexy bookmarks plugin on your blog to encourage readers to share your content with others.

7. Track your website’s performance

Monitor the traffic of your website by installing Google Analytics. It will show you how many visitors you receive each month, week and day plus what sites are linking to you. It also shows the keywords people are entering into the search engines to find your content.

Some of the ways you can make money from your authority site are: selling affiliate products, creating your own products (ie ebooks, reports), Adsense Ads or selling advertising.

Building an authority site takes patience and hard work but if you keep adding unique content that attracts lots of backlinks it will become a profitable business.

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