Do You Have An Authoritative Website?

You may be asking, what exactly is an authoritative site?

First, it will reference other web sites that cover the same subject matter.

Next, inbound links are important when determining an authoritative site. Your links should be chosen carefully to ensure that they are relevant to your websites subject matter. When developing your inbound links make sure that they contain your top keywords.

Last, an authoritative site should contain many, if not hundreds of pages, covering every area of the main topic.

The above suggestions will help to determine whether your site will be considered an authority and can also improve your sites page ranking. It may not seem like it at times but the search engines want you to
succeed and make money, but they also want you to play by their rules.

What does an authoritative site provide? In one sentence, an incredible amount of original material and a memorable visitor experience.

It is important not to get distracted from the most important aspect of your website, which is visitor optimization. The goal of all websites should be to generate thousands of visitors through major search engines while also providing a one stop source of information for your subject.

Focus your efforts on optimizing your content and preparing your website for visitors instead of just for search engine optimization. Why generate thousands of visitors when your site does not offer anything of value to keep them there?

The About website is a good example of a very general authoritative site. It has a generic domain name with hundreds of subdomains on different subjects.

Your website should use this same approach but should focus on a more specific market. Create subdomains or pages within your site that cover specific topics inside your main subjects content. This will allow you to target specific areas while getting more targeted traffic relating to your pages content.

A website should contain at least three things to be considered an authority site.

1. The more RSS feeds that you have throughout your website the easier it will be to keep your content updated and your visitors satisfied. One feed alone is not enough and your visitors should be able to find your RSS feeds using any targeted keywords relating to your websites topic.

2. It is important that your website creates a sense of community. Use features such as surveys, comments and feedback. If you make these features easily available to your visitors then your website traffic will increase because people will feel that you actually care about them. Interaction is
a very powerful tool and not many are taking advantage of it.

3. Be consistent! Provide original, informative content on a regular basis. You have to become an authority on your websites content to bring in repeat visitors.

Search engine page ranking is also important for determining whether your site is considered an authority.

So how do search engines determine a particular pages prominence?

1. How many clicks away from the home page is your page? The more clicks away then the less prominence it has.

2. The keyword density of your page is another criterion used by the search engines. How do the keywords in your meta tags relate to your page content?

3. The number of links pointing to your page is important to the search engines when your page is indexed. Having a number of links connecting other pages within your site to the page getting indexed is a good idea to improve that pages ranking.

4. Use your targeted keywords toward the top of your page and often enough throughout your page to let the search engines know of their importance.

5. Updating your site frequently with new information, pages, and content verbiage will increase both visitor traffic and your search engine ranking. One way to add fresh content is by writing original relevant articles for your website.

6. Every page should have a title, description and keyword meta tag. This will help to ensure that the search engines index your entire site.

7. To make it easier for the search engines to determine your pages relevancy, try to have only one or two topics per page.

Of course, creating an authority site will take time and a lot of patience. But the results are worth it. So increase your targeted traffic with a well designed, well written, well placed and well connected authoritative website.

Copyright 2006 by Joe Rispoli

About The Author-- Through years of research Joe Rispoli has put together the most relevant of free advertising resources to get you started on the right path to accomplishing your online marketing goals. So, before committing yourself to a large budget, take the time to research the information that is available on his website and learn how to advertise your business for free.

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