How To Build An Authority Site

With so many changes to search engine algorithms there is no doubt that the days of small sites with a minimal number of articles are going to be ranked lower and lower in the search engines.

We now need to think about building authority sites that have real value and that really do cover topics more fully and have many pages of content.

But many people seem unsure about just what an authority site really is and how to go about building a site that has real authority in the eyes of search engines and can get high listings for content, just like Hubpages does.

Although I have written extensively about how to build an authority site I thought it would be well worth covering some of the basics again so we know what is expected of a blog or website to gain authority status.

If we wish to build an authority site that is really going to give us a long term and steady income then we need to select a fairly broad niche. We do not want it to be too narrow so that we cannot expand it out to cover many topics surrounding a central theme.

If we are going to build an authority site around products then we should try to pick the general category as our niche and website title. This means that we can then cover individual products in detail, all around our central theme.

So, a nice general theme that is broad and gives us plenty of scope to then write about hundreds of products within that niche would be ideal. We can test out how well a product may do in terms of sales and visitor interest by first writing about the subject right here on Hubpages. This then also gives us the opportunity to include a link to our new site, and backlinks really are at the heart of having an authority site of our own.

An authority site is one that is relatively large with many articles on it, but that alone will never give us a site that has authority status.

Our aim is that, somewhere down the line, maybe a year after it is first created, our authority site will rank very highly in search engines for any post that we put on it. We can rank highly for competitive terms, just as Hubpages does.

If we owned a site like that then we can make money by providing information that people are searching for and make a commission on a sale from a product. But to get there there is one very important factor. Backlinks.

I have written extensively on this subject and at my Make Money Blogging site you can find many resources to aid you in your backlinking work. But let us take a look at it here.

We need to get backlinks to our articles for a number of reasons. A keyword specific backlink to a hub we write or a post on our own blog is a postiive vote for that term in the search engines. The more we have the more votes we get and the higher that article will rank in the search engines. If we get backlinks to our Hubs, which we should, we will find that very quickly they rank much higher in search engines. Put links on sites like Ezinearticles, Squidoo, Infobarrel and Olivearticles and we can get many more visitors to read our content.

Our aim should be to get links from others to every single post on our site. Gradually these links build to make our site be extremely popular in the eyes of the search engines and this will give us many visitors and will boost where we appear in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

We want backlinks to every post on our site, and we need to be constantly doing this to rank higher. We get more traffic and we are then seen as the authority website for that particular topic.

We are then able to write about very competitive keywords and rank well with no backlinks because of the history of the site being so popular. This is how Hubpages itself works and how we need to treat our own authority site.

If we can do this on a consistent basis then we will have our own authority site that gets vast numbers of visitors and will allow us to make money on the Internet and earn from our interests or writing skills.