7 Tips to Boost Your Site Authority

As soon as you start to learn about search engine optimization, you’ll hear about site authority. Usually right after you learn about keywords. And for good reason. Site Authority is one of the big factors of how well you will rank for anything on your entire site.

Let’s look at what you can do to boost your website’s authority.

External Links

The most basic sign of authority is the one that was first implemented in the early days of Google. The idea was that as people find high-quality content that is helpful and related to the topic, then link to it, the cream and quality sites will eventually rise to the top.

While things have changed since then, and a lot of safety measures are in place so you can’t scam your way to the top by buying links, your site authority is still largely determined by the quality of natural, high-quality, incoming links.

How do you get those? By sharing great content and getting the ball rolling by telling your target audience about it.

How do you do that? Social media is a great option, which also brings us to my next point.

Social Signals

Once you start to get the ball rolling on social media sites, others will start to share your content. Guess what? That gives you incoming links and it sends what is called “social signals”.

As you post about your new article, it gets shared and readers like your content, comment, and along with that, your site will gain authority. This authority will build over time.

Internal Links

Similar to what we were working on with external links, internal links are just as important! When you link internally to another like article or page, you are telling the search engines and your reader that those pages are equally as important as the original page.

Try to include at least 3 -5 internal links on a typical article; more if it is a long-form article. Please do not overwhelm them with links throughout the piece.

Website Age

Age will also help you as time goes on. The best time to have registered a domain was ten years ago. The next best time is today.

Get your site started, work on getting high-quality content up, and start sharing it with the right audience. Your authority will start to grow as time goes by. Don’t obsess or worry over the age factor. It is what it is.

Building search engine traffic takes time and not just because of the age factor. Instead, continue to work on your site, knowing that ranking will become easier with time.

This is in part, not just because of your website’s age and authority, but also because you have more content on your site that will rank for a variety of keywords. As you grow your audience, they will help you spread the word, creating more social signals, and incoming links for you.

On-Page SEO Optimization

The next step in improving your domain authority is to work on your on-page SEO. These are specific factors that you add as you are writing an article or creating a page. Here are some of the typical items you will need to include.

Keywords for each page
Headings/subheadings to break up text
Stylized Text
Images with keywords in the file name and alt text
Keyword in url
Meta descriptions

Work on Your Technical SEO

Technical SEO is more about the structure of the site. Here are a few things to look at for your reader’s enjoyment which will ensure that they stick around to read and share your site.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly – A must today as well over 60% of visitors use mobile for search and visiting sites.
Improve Your page speed – Readers are impatient so if your site is slow to load, they will not wait for it.
Offer the security layer of SSL – this will ensure that you are found in the search results and your site will be marked as safe to view.

Be Patient

This one is the hardest part! Building authority for your site does take time, but as you build your business, your site will build right along with it.

Stay patient, continue to provide good content, and you will continue to grow your authority and trust.