How to Build Your Website Authority in 30 days
Want to get more organic website traffic from Google? Umm, Yeah..
Over this post, we will be looking into some handy ways to boost your Website Authority in just 30 Days. A pretty important thing to remember is the higher the authority of your website, the easier it will be to rank pages for relevant keywords. Simples right?
The concept of domain authority has been around since 1999 when the internet was young and slow, when computers would ‘never need an upgrade’. The publication of a paper by Jon Kleinberg titled ‘Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment’ first cited this concept. But some even to this day refuse to even acknowledge it’s existence.
SEO expert Bill Hartzer recently jumped in a Reddit AMA with Google’s John Mueller and asked about domain authority existence or non-existence. John Mueller’s fairly funny response danced around a straight answer, but also was consistent with the previous rebuttal from Team Google that a domain authority ranking is not in use at Google, nor exists. Hmmm…
So what about this measurement and how does it work. Well, the Domain Authority Score is basically a proprietary metric which utilises none other than machine learning to make it’s calculations. The model evaluates the domain based on a bunch of predetermined metrics which we consider most important in working out the authority of a domain. Some of these include the domain’s backlink profile, organic traffic and keyword positions, and other deeper website traffic data that only Google & Moz seem to know.
So now you have been tasked with improving your Authority, and as usual, results are expected in the first month so we better find a good place to start.
Guest Posting
Everyone’s favourite, Guest Posting in 2018 from a technical standpoint is about publishing high-quality articles on websites, within the niche you work, and that is popular amongst your target audience, finish that off with high domain score and a bunch of backlinks and you’re onto a winner.
As boring as I’m starting to find Guest Posting as an SEO technique, there are still some standardised rules to follow.
Once you have created that well-crafted article that includes links back to your original work, make sure you find relevant High Authority Domains in your market and reach out to them with a strong pitch.
Another method worth mentioning is to find another site on the web with a similar target audience to yours. Agreeing on some sweetheart deal to guest post on their website, and in return, they agree to post on yours. This works well if you are targeting similar audiences, make sure you don’t have any competing products though.
Guest on Podcast
Guest posting can be pretty hard work because most likely it will take a few hours to formulate a high-quality article. But featuring on a Podcast is not only a great piece of content, but it can do wonders for your Authority.
Well, how you might ask? Most of the podcasters create credits for that particular episode which can also be viewed as a well (you guessed it) blog post. You can benefit from the mentions and backlinks from this content, think about it. Spotify, Apple etc are all high ranking sites that give you backlink access once an episode is processed, along with all those handy social signals.
Create a 5 Minute App
Well (you heard me right) this one is slightly naughty and use at your own risk. But I would say there probably isn’t much risk. It involved creating an app from your website and using the backlinks from Apple, Google and Amazon App stores.
There are hundreds of companies that can help. Once this has been uploaded you can create your ‘Apps’ developer profile with a bunch of backlinks to your site. Pretty cool.
Share, Share, Share
Promote Your Content Regularly Across Social Media Channels
When you share content on social media (obviously) more people will be exposed to it. When people discover your (great) content they are more likely to share it with their network and expose it to audiences you might not have reached on your own. And, you have more chances to get links!
But, you need to share new content multiple times to get more attention. Twitter recently made changes to their rules – they want to stop people from sharing the same tweets over and over again. This means that you now have to be more creative with the content you share. When you are creating your blog content consider this idea:
We have started creating multiple images within our blog content that we can use for multiple Tweets/Facebook updates. This strategy allows us to discuss our blog posts from different angles and get more attention on social.
Remove Bad Links
If you have any ‘spammy’ links linking to your website, you need to make an effort to remove them.
Why is this so important? Because bad links can really hurt your website’s authority and consequently your Google ranking. The easiest way to identify bad links is to use the SEMrush backlink audit tool.
You can try and remove bad links by sending a link removal request to the website, or you can use the Google disavow tool to tell the search giant which links to ignore when assessing your website.
Optimizing Existing Content
When carrying out a website redesign, don’t forget about optimizing your existing content. When your current content begins ranking better on Google, more people will find it. If more people find your content, then you have a better chance that more people will link to it!
Here is one tactic you can use to increase the ranking of your older content.
You probably know that Google uses semantic content analysis techniques to help understand what your content is about. This means it is not looking only for the exact matches of keywords in your content; it is trying to understand what your content is about.
So, review your older, well-performing content and make sure you are using related keywords and synonyms in addition to your main keywords for that content.
Either way, updating old content is a good tactic. Have you noticed any top SEO professionals updating old content?
