Besides the fact that you need to have a clear idea about the information you would want to share with the rest of the world, there are some things that you would still need to learn and master if you want your dreams of dominating the search engine results to come true.
What’s up fellow SEO’s, I’m AJ and I’m back to talk to you about one of the most important and sometimes forgotten aspects when trying to rank well and staying ranked:
Domain Authority
Like many of Google’s magical spells, how the search engine actually calculates the scoring in each website’s domain authority is a complete unknown. But, both you and I know that we’ve come a long way already and it’s actually easy these days to predict and find patterns on how things work. We’ve easily predicted what the plot would be like on that Justice League movie, it shouldn’t be too hard to study a search engine’s behaviour.
Bringing it all back down to earth, domain authority or, as Google likes to call it, the online business authority is clearly a very important ranking factor, especially if your website scores really high in it. But first, how does a site get a good domain authority score? It all depends on your website’s popularity, trustworthiness and reputation.
(All these by the way have so many different ways to be faked. But thankfully, there are now other contingencies prepped by Google.)
The very few really successful sites out there have one thing in common, besides the obvious high domain authority levels. It’s the simple fact that these sites have a lot of links. Trustworthy links. Hence the part where you need trustworthiness to attain good domain authority. This is also why link building is so popular. The more links you got, the better. But these need to be meaningful kinds of links. These links should go to credible sources. Not like the ones everyone used to do back then where you spam everything with links. Nothing about that is trustworthy.
That type of path is deceptive. Why do every SEO company and agency out there have link building as one of their arsenals? It’s directly because of this. And if you’re in talks with a company that doesn’t have this technique down, bail out. Bail out now.
The number of backlinks a site has is also one of the things all these off-shoot 3rd party tools count to give off some pseudo domain authority score. What these tools can’t process yet (most of them) though, are precisely the thing that make’s Google’s scoring work. The quality of the links.
What are some examples of these quality back links? There are things link Wikipedia for example. It is one of the most sought after source of information even if we all know that information here can easily be edited out, in general, this site is still a good source of credible information. That being said, this does not mean that you should scoop out a mouthful of random links from Wikipedia and just shove it all on your content or website. That’s not how it goes. That’s not how it’s done. It hasn’t been like that since the early 2000’s.
Another aspect here is that you really need to invest the time to create content. Websites become very popular if they actually have the capacity to share unique content. And though this has been the norm and one of the aspects that never change, there are still so many website owners out there that do not have the temperament or even sliver of effort to produce and offer content to their would be customers. And most times, this is actually one of the things that are missing. They would come in and ask for SEO agencies to rank at a certain amount of time and rank to a certain degree, yet when you look at the site itself and you see that it really has nothing to offer, you know instantly that this will become a problem. Because no matter how much quality backlinks is produced for your website, if it doesn’t serve any purpose or does not give the visitors content as their reward for discovering your website, the campaign will never go anywhere. Trust me. We’ve seen it happen so many times.
But again, this goes back to quality. Yes, for some people, it is quite easy to produce content for their site. But if it isn’t of good quality, it will also be for nothing. Producing such low quality content might work for a short amount of time, but it will never last. Usually it really never works. What we modern SEO’s need to remember is that, because of past mistakes and exploits by all these abusive Black hatters, Google has evolved and has already made numerous contingencies to prevent abusive kinds of actions to manipulate Google’s search results. Yes, that sounds exactly how it does. Google now knows if the content you’re throwing out there is of low quality. It knows when your links go to pages that are not credible or if you are trying desperately to manipulate the reader into going to a page for purposes other than giving further information to the reader.
Why does Google have all these Age Of Ultron type intelligence updates? It’s simple. Google only wants to serve information to people and it wants to filter out the ones that are trying to abuse the system for selfish reasons.
One other aspect is the age of a website. If it’s gone through a lot and has been giving off quality information to the web non-stop for years, and the linking back to this site is non-stop, the domain authority score does go up. This shows that the site has some credibility and is continuously being sought after because people keep linking back to it.
Another detail, that could be missed here is the part where businesses should focus on taking care of their brand to build indestructible domain authority. Simply put if you have a business, build its brand. Build it in a way that one day it grows big until Google see’s it. If Google see’s that this brand is well sited, has credible sources of links and has been giving off quality content that people actually go after, it would be compelled to straight up pull your indexed pages up the ranks. Why? Because it trusts you enough that it knows that you will never do something shady because you’ve built your brand this well that you’ll have to be an idiot to screw up and spam your site at this point.
Lastly, one of the things that will boost you without a shadow of a doubt, is when and if other big brands decide to link to you. This is of course stronger than when they just mention you. Though this is also helpful. All companies that offer search engine optimization out there today from the US all the way down to Asia and back know this. Some smaller companies in fact can only dream of such luck getting mentioned or getting to link back to big brands. Like the point before this, Google will trust that since other big brands out there “like” you, that you wouldn’t do anything stupid.
Now you may ask, does Google like Big Brands? Well obviously. Big brands didn’t pop up overnight. These are like entire galaxies made up of millions of stars. It has quality back links, content and well built brand. Giving it an exceptional amount of domain authority. But all this is created in a span of a long long time. And if you are willing to wait always know that: