As soon as you start digging into search engine optimization, you’ll hear about site authority. Usually, it’s right after you learn about keywords. There’s a good reason for that – it is one of the big factors of how well you will rank for anything on your website. Let’s look at what you can do to boost your website’s authority. 

Internal And External Links 

The most basic sign of authority is the one that was first implemented in the earliest days of Google. The idea was that as people find high-quality and helpful content and link to it, the best sites will rise to the top. 

While things have changed since then (and a lot of safety measures are now in place so you can’t scam your way to the top by buying links), your website authority is still largely determined by the quality of natural, high quality incoming links. 

How do you get those? By sharing great content and getting the ball rolling by telling your target audience about it. How do you do that? Social media is a great option, which also brings us to my next point. 

Social Signals 

Once you start to get the ball rolling on social media sites, others will start to share your content. Guess what. That gives you incoming links and it sends what are called “social signals”. As your social posts about the latest article on your site get shared around and liked, your content and with it your site gain authority. This will build over time, as will the last thing we’ll talk about. 

Website Age 

Age will also help you as time goes on. The best time to have registered your domain was ten years ago. The next best time is today. Get started, get high quality content up, start sharing it with the right audience and your authority will start to grow as time goes by. Don’t obsess or worry over the age of your website. It is what it is. Building search engine traffic takes time and not just because of the age factor.

Instead, continue to work on your site, knowing that ranking will become easier as time goes by. This is in part because of your website’s age and authority, but also because you have more content on your site that will rank for a variety of keywords. As you grow your audience, they will help you spread the word, creating more social signals and incoming links for you. 

This is not an extensive list of what to do to boost website authority. There are lots of different factors involved that aren’t covered here. Search engines are deliberately vague about what moves the needle at any given time. That said, these factors are the ones that are most in your control and what I have found to help most.