A Complete Guide From Semalt On How To Build The Authority Of Your Website
If you want your keywords to rank high on the search engine result page, you need to make your website an authority one. The more authority your site has, the more search engines will rank it above your competitors. Getting a site to have authority isn't easy, and it can take a while before you see results that matter.
But it's worth it, and in this article, we'll show you how to build a site that people trust. As was already said, making a site with a lot of authority is not easy and takes a lot of work, especially the SEO part. If you do it and find it stressful, you can hire us at Semalt to do it for you. We are an SEO company, and the SEO work we do has helped thousands of sites build authority and become more relevant. Do check out what some of our clients have said about us here.
What Is the Authority of a Website?
Website authority is a term used in SEO to describe the "strength" of a domain as a whole. In this case, a domain's strength is its ability (or likelihood) to rank high in the SERPs and pass its backlink strength ("link juice") to other sites.
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric and not the same thing as "authority" when it comes to SEO. MOZ, a company that makes SEO software, made the latter to predict how likely it is that a website will show up in SERPs. It is measured on a scale from 1 to 100 and it is not a ranking factor for Google.
We know that Google cares about the authority of a website. In the context of E-A-T, they talk about it 186 times in their Search Evaluator Guidelines (expertise, authority, and trust).
No one knows for sure if Google uses an authority signal in its ranking algorithm or not because it is speculative, but still, the evidence is clear. What we do know is that Google uses human site evaluations, which are done with the help of a 164-page guide, to improve their search algorithms.
There is a lot of evidence that the quality of the content affects rank on SERP. Google's Hummingbird algorithm has used AI and semantics since it came out in 2013 to make search results more relevant to what people are looking for.
Instead of relying on keywords on a page, the search engine looks for the most relevant content that matches a search query.
Why is the authority of a website so important for SEO?
Google keeps saying that Domain Authority (as a metric) is not a factor in how sites are ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs). Google's John Mueller says, however, that there is still a sitewide score that "maps to similar things."
Before showing results for a search query, Google looks at more than 200 different things.
Some of the most important are the page's content and its backlink profile, as well as its speed and how well it works on mobile devices.
The New York Times, Wikipedia, and The Guardian are all sites that people trust and they are all big sites. But there can also be smaller sites like SERoundtable that are run by people like you who are seen as authorities.
Google gives more weight to authoritative sites in search results, and their quality guidelines say as much. To be honest, it's a traffic loop. The more traffic you get, the more authority you build, which leads to more traffic and more authority.
Why? Because Google's goal with search is to send people to websites that will help them. And Google thinks that websites written by experts are most likely to help people who use their search engine.
How to make a site that people trust
1. Implement User Intent:
Make sure your content matches the goal of the search term you are going after. If your keyword is "baking a cake," for example, most people probably want to know how to do it. That's what your content should say.
2. Make good content that can be linked to
This is closely related to the question of what the user wants. If you make good content that users can trust, they will keep coming back for more. Content about baking a cake should include images, step-by-step instructions, and helpful tips. The more trustworthy the information, the more likely it is that your users will like it. This will make it more likely that other sites will link back to you.
3. Link to good sites
Your content should have links to other sites that are trusted (external links). This tells search engines and users that you've done your research and offer the best content out there. Linking out to spammy sites does not help authority.
4. Make sure the site is set up right
The structure of the site is obviously very important for SEO in general, but making sure that everything is set up correctly before the site goes live will help gain authority. Title tags, URL tags, and header tags are all very important for the site as a whole. Make sure to use keywords that are relevant to each page. Putting NoFollow tags on links to pages that don't need to be crawled by search engines is also a good SEO practice and will stop any wasted crawling on the site.
Internal links within the site will help search engines crawl the site, make each page more relevant, and show that your site is professional and well put together. At the end of the day, professional websites that are set up and built correctly will usually do a great job of building authority.
5. Get good backlinks
Once you have some content on your blog, start building links. Reach out to sites that are similar to yours and might want to link to yours. Use social media to spread the word about your content and improve your chances of getting links. Another way to get good links is to post as a guest. The more authoritative your content seems to Google and other search engines, the more quality backlinks you have. Use relevant anchor text in your link, or close to it, whenever you can. This makes the link even more relevant.
6. Remove or NoFollow Toxic Links
If you find questionable sites that link to your content, do your best to get those backlinks removed. Sites that have a bad reputation will also hurt your reputation. If you can't get rid of them, you might want to disavow them.
7. Make internal links that are relevant
Internal links connect your content to each other. That gives web crawlers more information to look at when deciding if your content answers a search query or not. It can also increase the number of pages a user sees in a session as they click from one page to the next. Make sure that each link has relevant anchor text. This helps both your readers and search engines.
8. Pay less attention to the traffic on each page
The goal is to make the best resource on a certain subject. Even though some articles won't get much traffic, they are still a necessary part of the information resource that shows you are an expert on that topic. Individual page performance will be more than made up for by the overall increase in organic traffic to the site.
9. Don't artificially boost your authority numbers
You might think that the SERPs would be dominated by sites with higher website domain authority, and you wouldn't be the only one to think that. Many people, especially those who are new to SEO, do think that a higher DA means a better ranking.
But it doesn't happen all that rarely for pages on sites with less authority to rank higher than pages on sites with more authority. Why?
Because the DA score doesn't show how good the content is.
Many people will still try to use a private blog network (PBN) or link farms to boost these metrics in a fake way. If you ever had that thought, you should know that Google will know, which could lead to penalties.
The most important thing to remember is that website authority scores don't mean anything without good content, no matter how good they are.
Instead of trying to artificially boost your site's DA, mostly through "black-hat" SEO techniques, you should focus on making content that is useful and interesting to your audience.
Conclusion
Website authority is only one of the many metrics that a search engine likes to see. There are many other things that your site can do to improve results like getting natural backlinks, being well-organized, and posting quality content.
When making content for your site, you should focus first on the main goal (serving your audience) and how to accomplish that with good information. With this and a few quality backlinks, you are well on your way to building an authority site.
If you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our Semalt blog.