Create an Authority Site – Best way to Rank

Top Rank with Authority Sites!

An authority site is a high quality website that is trusted by the people in the industry. The site consist of high quality content and by quality content I mean articles, guides, reviews that people actually like and want to share with their friends.
What an authority site is not! It’s not a site only optimized for search engines, so it will rank high. It’s not an EMD site only targeting one niche.
What an authority site is! It’s a site that provides useful information to the user. It’s a site that people want to share. It’s an site that rank well on multiple search terms, both with long tail keywords and Exact Match Searches. In other words, if it’s properly built it should rank better than an EMD site!

Authority sites focus on two sources of traffic:

1. Free traffic from the Search Engines by using SEO.
2. Referral traffic from Social Networking Sites.

How to monetize an Authority Site?

Here is how you can make money of your authority site.

You can loan the site to a company within that niche.

You can sell it to a company within that niche.
Sell leads.
Put affiliate links / products on the site.
Put ads on the site by using AdSense. A tip is to not only use one of these methods, instead put AdSense and Affiliate links on it and sell leads to companies.

Domain.

Before we start build the site you will need a domain. Here are some tips how to pick the best domain.
The domain should be easy to read and spell, but the most important, is it should be easy to remember!
Always use .com!
Try to place you keyword in the domain!
Don’t use numbers in your domain! Instead try to use some prefix then your keyword!
When I first started building websites, I used HostGator, but today I use BlueHost for my clients sites and Authority sites.
HostGator work great if you want to build a blog or just starting to build websites. But for your clients I would not recommend HostGator since their shared hosting is to slow.
Want the best hosting? Start using Bluehost like me!

Build the website!

WordPress.

I usually use WordPress when I build my sites, since its one if the easiest CMS on the internet. It’s not one of the fastest, but it’s stable and has a large number of users, so it’s easy to get support.

Theme.

When choosing theme, try to buy some premium theme or use some free ones. Don’t download premiums themes from non-trusted sources, since they might have vulnerabilities which may lead to your website gets hacked.
Some great theme I use:
Heatmap, CTR Theme, WP Herald, Clickbump and AdSense Pro Ultimate.

Plugins.

One of the best features with WordPress is the large amount of plugins. However, all is not good and it’s hard to find good plugins that won’t harm or slow down your site.
Here are some of my favorite WordPress Plugins:
All in one SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast
Link Cloaking (Great to hide affiliate links)
Contact Form 7
W3 Total Cache
Google XML Sitemap
WP Sitemap Page
Broken Link Checker
I try not to use too many plugins as it increases you loading time, which will affect the number of visitors.

Modify WordPress settings.

To speed up your site is suggest you disable pingbacks and trackbacks.
Add a ping service list (Here are a list of ping services) to add ping services go to [Settings > Writing]

Permalinks.

Set permalinks as /%postname%/

Reduce images size.

Set a max size on the images, this will reduce the sites loading time. To change image size go to [Settings > Media]

Disable Default Gravator images.

By disable the Gravator images, you will reduce the sites loading time. Go to Settings > Discussion and check Blank.
Most authority sites are based on information people might need. Therefore, you should create many articles with high quality, which you publishes over a few days. Start by publishing 30-50 high quality articles which you publish during a week, then continue to publish 100+ articles each month. It’s important that you continue to publish articles each week and you should atleast publish one article per week. The more content you publish the faster the site will get indexed by Google. An example of this is news sites, they publish several news articles every day and they are indexed in seconds / minutes.
When you start to publish content, try to make it look natural. Don’t publish 100+ of articles each day, it will not appear real and it might hurt your site!
Learn how to set up plugins for you authority sites