First off lets be very clear
Google is killing of low content, low quality sites.

What they refer to as “Authority Sites” are the new way into
Google’s top rankings.

Check out any top 10 search these days and you see a lot
more authoritative sites and very few (if any) small sites.

I have put together an explanation of authority sites and what you need to be doing to keep up with Google right here in this post.

So how do you create authoritative sites?

Great content, Great content & More great content!

But where do you start? As always, you start with keyword research.
Just as important today as it has ever been but you need work smarter.

The facts:
Authority Sites are the way forward for SEO
Authority Sites will stand the test of time and stay ranked
Authority sites will rank new pages fast
Authority sites will rank “hard to rank” keywords much easier
Authority sites will rank for keywords you never even targeted
Authority sites are money in the bank

So you need to start thinking differently.

Forget fast rankings
Forget targeting one keyword per page,
Forget only five posts on a site
To some degree forget about keyword competition.

Start to build authority sites or start make your current sites into
authority sites. Focus on adding interesting and useful content to you sites. Focus on content quality and visitor experience. I know the old idea was to get them to your page, get them to click and ad. We’ll those days have gone. The new way is to get them  to your site, engage them with content, keep them interested and on your site, sure sell or advertise  on your site, after all you are here to make money right?

Oh, and while there interested get your visitors to sign up to your list, give away some cool stuff, offer related, interesting and valuable free products. Get them on your list.

Like I said above , some of the old keyword research ideas can go out the window. Authority sites bring in most of their traffic from long tail keywords. So for instance you may target a “Valentines Day” as a keyword. What is your chances of ranking in the top ten for that?

Well with authority sites you just don’t care. Very few people look for “Valentines Day” anyway. More likely “what is great present for my girlfriend on valentines day”.  And that’s the kicker. As your site grows and gains authority it will rank for all sorts of long tailed keyword phrases.

So you can happily target high competition keywords and still win. Even better, long term you may even rank for those very high competition keywords.

That also means you can target more than one keyword on a page (related of course). Think about this, if you have more keywords on a page then your backlink anchor text can be more diverse. Another winner in the Google stable, avoiding those Penguin and Panda penalties.

The next step in authority sites is LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Actually this is a commonly, incorrectly used expression. For current search results Google probably does not use true LSI.
It is likely that it would massively increase the required processing power and storage needed.

However what is abundantly clear is that Google most certainly does use some king “Semantically related words” measure. That means that there is an expectation that certain “semantically related” words are likely to appear in content on a particular subject.

Realistically if you read an article on David Beckham you would expect to as find words like football and  Victoria etc.  These semantically related words will help improve the look of your content in the eye’s of Google. So articles with these words will score higher for SEO than those without.

Understanding which words are considered “semantically related” can be a challenge.  Some things are obvious (you’d think) but how do you know what Google actually think (in SEO terms).

The only real way to understand that would be, as an example, to do a Google search for “David Beckham”. Take look at the top 10 results. Go to those web pages and read them. Make a note of all the keywords that appear on those pages and see which ones occur regularly.

As Google have placed these pages in it’s first page results then it is actually endorsing the content. Whatever words are being used in the text of these top ranking pages are what Google are looking for.

So back to your authority site. The very keywords that are appearing in the top ten results for any specific search are the very same words you should be adding to your content that targets the same keywords.

Following and repeating this process is the way forward to create sites with authority. These sites will will need a constant source of content while continually gaining authority. At some point the authority itself will rank even more keywords, rank tougher keywords, new pages will rank quickly and your visitor number will grow.

These sites are much more stable as well. Newcomers don’t knock you off the top with one backlink blast.

Other advantages. Exact Match Domains are just not required, in fact not having one may be an advantage. Create a cool brand rather than a keyword. Target your keywords in the extended URL rather than the domain name.

Good SEO practices are still required,  however mass back linking etc. is just not needed or even desired so the amount of work to do is actually reduced for the same results.

Finally as is a good structure is important. Try to tier your website keeping things in a “related” tiers so that Google can easily understand what your site is about and what parts are connected.

For instance, if your site is about Jewellery, the structure it in tiers of Necklaces, Bracelets, Anklets, Earrings.  Under each main tier heading add  Silver Mount, Gold Mount and under those add Diamond, Emerald, Ruby, Pearl. You can then add articles to each one

So your URL structure will look something like

JenkinsJewllery.com/earings/silver_mount/emerald/how_to_ select_the_best_cut_for_your_ face shape

A very clear indication to Google as to exactly what should be on that page.

Then add compelling content and few Semantically related keywords for the perfect post.

I have created a cool new plugin “Authority Site Keyword intelligence Tool” that allows you find all the authority keywords you need in minutes.

Click Here To look  at the  demo video

 

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