Our company was established in 2004. Authority sites (or rather authority site status) is what you are interested in if you are in the hunt for top position in the rankings of the search engines. In SEO terms, working on an already established authority site make your job 10-times easier than a website that has not already achieved this status.
A few websites are already authority sites, but since they have not undergone search engine optimization they are not recognized by the search engines as such. Most websites, however, either lack the content or lack the quality links to be considered an authority site.
On most search engines (like Google), for the highly competitive, high traffic keywords, you will notice that generally the top 10 results are loaded with authoritative websites. There are some exceptions of course, but in general the search engines smile favorably upon the websites they define as an authority in a particular industry and reward these sites with top SERPS.
What makes an authority site?
Authority websites generally have more content (quality content) and more pages than other sites. The search engines feed on content-rich websites and those with many pages and much useful content per page will do better when going head-to-head with a smaller site.
It should be the goal of every website owner to gain authority links to their website. Links from other authoritative websites in your field to your site will help establish your site as an authority site as well. Search engines generally give more weight to the incoming links from authority pages as long as their main keyword is the same as your own.
How do you establish your site as an authority site?
First, add more pages to your site. Second, add more quality content to those pages. Third, find some authority link partners willing to link to your site. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Before adding more pages to the website, most likely some research will have to be conducted. Get some ideas by checking out what the competition is doing and how they are doing it. You may come up with some good ideas as to why they are beating you in the search engine rankings and you may want to take corrective action.
Once you know what pages to add, you will either need to write some content, delegate this task to someone else, or hire a copywriter to do this for you. If you already know how to write content-rich, keyword-rich text, then you can take this task on with very little expense. If this is not your strength, then you may delegate this task or hire someone else to do it.
Once you have more pages with more relevant, quality content, you will need to solicit other authority sites to link to your website. This can be accomplished through email or by phone call. Some will and some will not respond to your requests. The more excellent content and better design of your web pages, however, the more likely others who you don’t even know will want to link to you.
As your site gains more pages, more content and more high-ranking link partners, you will want to continually make sure your pages are optimized for the search engines.
After all of these steps have been taken, then it is time to be both aggressive and patient at the same time. Be aggressive in continuing to build your website and be patient because overnight successes and websites that go viral are rare. Work hard and be patient and eventually your website will reach authority status.
Examples
Here are some examples of authority websites and webpages for the SEO industry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Authority
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
https://searchengineland.com/
https://moz.com/
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/
