Guest comment: How to become an Authority Site in Google
- Added:
- Aug 19, 2008
How can your website become an authority in site Google for your field? Darren Jamieson, content editor at Just Search explores how organisations can improve their SEO success.
Natural SEO isn’t just about editing tags on your website, inserting some well chosen keyphrases and building up links. The most successful websites on the Internet, the ones Google consider authorities in their fields, all have similar things in common. Many of them don’t even use conventional SEO practises, yet they rank above seemingly better optimised websites for relevant searches.
1. Content
You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘Content is King’ before. The content of a website is the single biggest factor for any SEO success; after all, it’s your content that gets you rankings. Your website should have good quality, well written content on every page. Be careful though, that doesn’t mean you should stuff your pages with keywords. You should be writing content for users to read, not for search engines to index. Make your content intelligent and interesting, as opposed to being unreadable due to some misguided belief that forcing keywords where they don’t belong will help your SEO.
2. Site saturation
Look at your competitors’ websites – the ones that are more successful than yours. How many pages do they have indexed by Google? The chances are it’s a lot, probably in the tens of thousands and above. Site saturation is an important authority factor and adding more pages to your website should be your top priority.
3. Industry News
To become an authority site in Google you should be offering industry news for your sector. If someone wants to find out anything about your field, whatever it may be, your website should be their first port of call. If you have a news section that is updated daily with the latest information, your rankings, both for generic keyphrases and long tail searches will improve.
Every news item added to your website becomes a new page, increasing your site saturation.
4. Different Contributors
Adding all of this content to your website isn’t something you should attempt yourself - the key is to work smarter, not harder. Spread the job of adding content to your website around your workforce, or outsource it to an agency if you don’t have the time.
Having different authors on your website is a key factor to getting accepted into Google News, which in turn is another symbol that you’re well on your way to becoming an authority site.
5. Build links through Content
Link building is important for any website, though buying links isn’t the way to go about it. A more natural, relevant link building method is to garner the links through well written, intelligent, thought provoking content. The more interesting the content on your website, the more traffic you’ll receive through natural search and the more links you receive organically.
In short, adding content increases your search engine presence.
By Darren Jamieson
Content Editor
Just Search