One of the few ways in which Google classifies a website as an authority is by its inbound links, which until recently was the prime ranking factor. While Google has gradually shifted its attention to click-through-rate, bounce rate and other user interaction signals, there are still some not-talked-about ranking factors that are taken into account.
Authority Website Elements
- Website Structure which I have already written a post on, is absolutely critical to your website's success. Check out that post for more in-depth information about how to correctly structure your website in a hierarchical form that promotes rankings, trust & authority.
- Amount of Pages - It should be pretty common sense that having large sites creates more authority just due to the pure fact that larger sites have more content, information, user interaction, incoming links, social signals, traffic, etc... However, most people are still pretty adamant about the fact that they can rank 2-3 page dinky micro niche websites for incredibly competitive niches. And this is just a fallacy. No 3-page site is going to have trusted websites linking to it, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense for Google to do so.
- Freshness of Content - The phrase "Content is King" is thrown around a lot by authority bloggers such as Neil Patel, Rand Fishkin, and others and with good reason - Google loves content. Especially fresh, high quality content. For a majority of queries, pages with more than 2500 words tend to do leagues better than pages with even 2000 words. As such - it should come as no surprise to you that large sites that contain large volumes of fresh content tend to very well in the search engines. YouTube is a prime example.
- Page Speed - It bewilders me how much people over look this simple factor. It's no secret that Google loves UX, so how is the biggest determining factor of user experience simply ignored? Studies show that pages with slower page speeds tend to extremely poor on the search engines. Try these simple tricks to dramatically improve your page loading speed.
- Check on Google Page Speed Insights to see where you stand.
- Decompress image files to decrease your page size. You can use EWWW for this.
- Use a CDN to distribute your content from wherever is closest to the user.
- Genesis Framework can help immensely and I use it personally.
- Caching plugin. Personally, I use W3 Total Cache because it's freaking awesome.
- Branding - Lots of people use branding for branding purposes but rarely ever do they understand the implications of having a properly branded entity online. Branding goes far beyond creating logos, fonts, business cards, custom themes, and all this. That's great for the visual & physical world. But asides from just having a website and a couple of social media profiles you need to expand into every single social networking and web 2.0 platform out there. Your name / brand must be EVERYWHERE. This includes forums, social media, file sharing sites, social bookmarking sites, essentially anywhere you can make a profile - DO IT. The more Google finds that brand online the more authority & trust is assigned to it.
- Domain Authority - While Domain Authority is a metric calculated by Moz and not a property of Google, it is pretty damn good at predicting rankings. So much so that Google at one point started to re-update its PR Toolbar to draw attention away from DA. So you should always be monitoring your Moz metrics and finding ways to improve it.
Closing Statement
I hope this post was full of information that you might've otherwise looked the other way on. There's a lot of elements on here that most people completely ignore that can give you a leg up on your competition.Often times, beating out your competitors might just be matching them on what they're doing right, correcting what they're doing wrong and then capitalizing on the things they're not paying attention to. This is a core component of our SEO strategy.
The reason being is that if your competitor is #1 for any given term, THEY MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT. Our job is to find these elements and matching the competition on them. Then capitalizing on their errors & miscues.
If you've been keeping up with my other posts, you might've noticed that I drop a lot of "hints" at innovative tricks that we use to rank websites. However, all it comes down to is finding opportunities that are over-looked and taking full of advantage of it.
"Stacking unfair advantages until it becomes an overwhelming advantage" - Mike Long
Talk soon,
David Alvarez.
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