Website Authority
What is site authority? Its a combination of a few things;
- How long your domain has been registered. This is by far the single most important part of you online identity. The longer your domain has been around, the more authority it has.
- How long your domain is registered. Seems logical right? If you are serious, you will register it for the maximum (or at least 10 years). Both 1 & 2 can be checked here : http://whois.domaintools.com/
- The age of your website. This is different from the domain. If you buy a domain but have no website, it doesn’t count. Just like search engines do, you can check on how long you website has been around at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
- Backlinks are addressed separately as #3 on the list of the 10 most important SEO attributes, but they greatly contribute to your site authority according to your industry theme. (Theme is another way of saying business category in search-speak) If the backlinks to your site are highly correlated to a specific industry, this will increase your site authority. This is important to understand because you will hear a lot about link building but little about how theme is important in link building. There is a fork in the road for every SEO when actively building backlinks. If you allow links to occur naturally, there is nothing to be concerned about. But because there are many ways to get backlinks to increase your Page Rank, including buying links, you must know that search engines are paying attention to how your backlinks represent your business. Backlinks from other themes tend to have a dilutive affect – they confuse the search engines. So quality more than quantity of backlinks is very important to your site authority.
So where do you get the best backlinks?
A more nuanced reading can be found at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
