19 Feb SEO Best Practice: Cultivation of Authority is the Goal of SEO

“Cultivation of Authority is the Goal of SEO”

–-From the makers of SEO Ultimate Plugin, who have been perfecting the art for years

Optimizing your website stems from the desire to reach the top 3 spots (the traffic band). Getting there is ultimately determined by how authoritative your page is and the website that supports it.

Every page of your website (if optimal) represents an opportunity to rank that page and dozens more when combined with SEO best practices, such as:

• Relevant meta data (for every page).
• A mirrored keyword-rich URL structure for the primary market and semantic focus of the page.
• Proper H1 use to reflect the primary keyword
• Sufficient inclusion of theme relevant keywords for the primary and secondary keyword shingles (groups of words).
• Awareness of link-flow limitations (not having 100+links on a page via navigation and contextual areas to bleed ranking factor).
• Use of optimal internal linking
• Proper site architecture that reflects a natural data hierarchy (with more competitive keywords higher up in the hierarchy and less competitive categories and mid-tail and long-tail keyword variations supporting the theme).
• Proper grammar and conversion cues
• The proper proportion of themed inbound links from qualified sources to the home page and deep links to various supporting categories and landing pages (with their primary shingles and / or synonyms).
• The takeaway here is, cultivation of authority is the goal of SEO. Once that authority has been realized, it must be leveraged to propel entire clusters of keywords into a prominent search engine position (with minimal backlinks) from using the overlapping nodes of relevance and page level trust and relevance score it has accumulated.

The extent of the authority depends on:

(a) the freshness and introduction of new / supporting content

(b) the volume of content

(c) the age of the domain

(d) the relevancy or the internal link structure and most importantly

(e) the time to authority factor (like a fine wine aging over time) that represents the priceless / more elusive ranking factor to distill in reverse or from the perspective of a competitor to emulate.