5 Content Pieces That Can Help You Build Site Authority

This is a guest post from Kaila Strong, Account Manager at Vertical Measures

Internet Marketing Infographic by Vertical Measures

Other than revenue, a website's success can be measured by the amount of targeted visitors that it receives. More targeted traffic often translates to more revenue. To achieve this objective the site must rank highly in the SERPs for keywords that your target group is actually using to search. The only way to enjoy a websites continued success is by retaining this high number of targeted visitors month in and month out. Listed here are five tasks to help achieve this, in no particular order.

Content

A constant flow of fresh content is the main objective for any website to maintain a consistent following of readers. A well written search engine optimized article involves the proper placement of just the right keywords, an engaging headline, and often a creative or interesting writing style to make the piece stand out from the rest.

The subject matter of content, and the way it’s delivered are of the utmost importance. When an article is written strictly with SEO in mind and no thought is given to the article's continuity, the piece is likely to be a flop – no shares, no links to it, and probably very little traffic to the page which equals little help to building your domain authority. Sure, it is important to write articles that are search engine optimized; however, it's equally important to keep the readers interested.

So what type of content should you provide? A variety of media can act to facilitate the process of building authority through content. Here are five of them: 

#1 Video

An effective tool at your disposal is video. In May of this year alone, Google reported that YouTube reached a whopping 14.6 billion internet video views and that's only 43 percent of the total online views for that month. That’s 34 billion videos viewed on the internet in one month!

Drive traffic, leads and business through the use of video marketing and optimization. A recent webinar discussed this very topic and gave great tips such as:

• Start with keyword research and other market research to determine the best topic your audience will love
• Try informational keywords and long tail terms
• Optimize videos for search engines: Have compelling titles, add a description, add tags, make sure it’s high quality resolution, pick the best thumbnail image, have a video sitemap on your site, include a transcript on the page where your video is embedded, use microdata, and limit it to 1 video per page.

#2 Infographics

An interesting and creative Infographic can be used to build site authority when done correctly and executed well too. You’re able to show your site visitors an interesting and unique take on a set of data, helping them to connect to the piece on a sensory level.

Coming up with a creative concept, working with a designer to execute your idea, and then promoting the Infographic may seem easy on the surface but require a bit of strategy and planning. A few tips:

• Have a brainstorm session with your team to come up with possible topic ideas.
• Conduct market research and keyword research too
• Any sources you want to use – verify them first before you develop the graphic!
• Stick to a simple layout
• Include SEO rich copy on the page where your Infographic resides
• Include an embed code on the page
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#3 Webinars

Just about any industry could use webinars to help build their site authority. Using presentation software, like PowerPoint, and presenting to a group of users through webinar software or even a video sharing program can help build notoriety for your brand, can be leveraged for links, and be added as content to your site. A few pointers:

• Conduct market research to see what topics you should cover in your webinar. Do a bit of keyword research too.
• Record your webinars and upload to video sites. Pay careful attention to their terms of service however, to ensure your content won’t get reported and taken down.
• Use slide decks on sites like SlideShare. Opt to have the notes section of the slides added to the upload.
• Embed webinars on a site on your page – sticking to one video or slide deck per page.
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#4 Blog Posts

Regular old blog posts are of course a great way to get down on virtual paper what you think your readers are interested in seeing. Whether it’s a top 10 post, an editorial, a post on a controversial subject, or any one of these 50 corporate blogging topics, the use of blog posts to help you build site authority can be effective. A few more tips:

• Don’t just limit yourself to blogging on your own site. Try out guest blogging on a few of your favorite industry blogs and become a regular writer!
• Optimize your posts for search engines paying special attention to H1s, adding custom meta titles and descriptions, and custom tags to the post as well.
• Link to others and let them know about it. They might just help you promote the post when it’s live.
• Add a plugin like Zemanta to help you build relevant backlinks from other blogs.

#5 White Paper or Free Guide

Have an industry expert at your company who likes to write? Have them develop a white paper or free guide. If you don’t have the resources, try sourcing it out to a freelancer who has a knack for writing educational pieces. White papers and free guides aren’t just great for lead capture; they’re also great for building site authority. If it’s useful and interesting, more people will be willing to read it, share it and link to it. A few tips:

• Decide whether you want your guide to be free to all or if you want it to be available for users who give you some information (such as e-mail, name, phone number, etc…).
• Conduct research to see if there is enough information to provide on the topic for your guide.
• Optimize your guide for search engines by paying attention to SEO PDF best practices.

Simply put, building your sites authority in any niche is a matter of making that website popular and growing its following through any and all means available. You want engaging content that will keep users on the site, get shares through social channels, be found by search engines, and receive lots of backlinks. By diversifying the types of content you develop you’re sure to find a method that your audience appeals to and that can aid in the pursuit of building your sites authority. Check out the below infographic to view a few other ways you can use content to build the authority of your site.

What type of content have you found works best for your target demographic?