You probably have come across this term before – “become an authority and you will reap the benefits of your efforts online”. Yeah, everybody talks about it, and searching for the term “How to build authority” on Google will yield over 127 million results. That should tell you something.
Now the obvious question is, how do we get there? What is it do we have to do to build authority? Heck, why is that even important? All these questions are fortunately answered by Duane Forrester of Bing’s Webmaster Team. Earlier this year, I mentioned about Bing webmaster webinars and Google’s webmaster academy.
While you may not be a savvy Bing user, fact is that there are really some good info that you can extract from these webinars and the video below is one of them. It is a recording of an awesome webinar that Bing has been doing to help people understand how to improve rankings on search engines, among other things. Don’t know about you, but I like this kind of educational webinars, specially when there are some real good stuff in there. And this one does.
So, moving forward, here are some highlights of this recorded webinar. I highly recommend you watching it. It is a little over an hour, but the time spent is totally worthwhile, specially if you are just in the beginning. If you want a bit of a shortcut and want to skip the introduction and all that, you can jump directly to the part that starts on 15min (+/-), although if you have the time, watching it from the beginning is suggested.
But first…
What Is An Authority?
The dictionary defines authority, among other things, as an entity or someone with power, or in this case, the power to influence others. Authority is something that you can’t buy – it is earned. You are an authority when other people says you are, period.
How To Become an Authority Online?
Duane sums it up by saying:
Your ability to connect with people online is what will influence your ability to to grow and build your authority
Authority Building Shortlist
- Know your topic inside out
- Engage with your community
- Share useful content (preferably freely)
- Be consistent and useful
- Market your strenghts
- Be a go-to resource
- Learn to spot trends in data
Here’s also a good article from QuickSprout: A Cheat Sheet for Building High Ranking Authority…Without Cheating
Why is authority important?
Having authority on something is important because it influences your reputation, credibility and ultimately impacts your rankings. All these combined affects your business, that is why it is important.
With all that said, here’s Duane Forrester walking through what Authority is, how to build it, how to leverage it and the role it plays in how you ultimately rank.
That’s it! What do you think about this webinar on building authority? Learned something new? Do you agree/disagree with some part of it? What say you?
image credit: beverlyboston.com
Related Posts
6 Principles of Effective Social Selling
Ways to Gain Influence through Blogging
SEO Secrets, Medium, Link Building Tips, CommentLuv Madness, Speedlink 32:2012
SEO and Internet Marketing 101 – Free Tutorial
Curate Content for a Well-Balanced Blog
Affiliate Marketing Tips – Future of Publishing Part 2
Four Guest Blogging Tips to Land on ANY Blog- How to Work Successfully With Press Release Agencies
Doug Pretorius
Nice share, and excellent commentary, I like how you summed up in a few paragraphs how to and why it’s important to build authority.
One thing I think is important for anyone starting out is to know this: You don’t HAVE to be an expert with years of experience on a subject to build a solid reputation. But if you don’t have the experience then you need to be a great researcher and abstract thinker to be able to grasp what’s important and distill it into usable information and/or a workable plan.
Ti Roberts
Great piece, DiTesco. When you’ve become an authority online and are well known SEO traffic comes to you naturally because by then you’ll have a loyal audience and community who voluntarily link to and share your content all the time.
They may even write review posts on you and your blog. In my opinion that’s the best kind of traffic to get. True referral traffic derived from the community of people around your blog. Thanks for sharing your insights about this topic with us.
Ti
Real Estate Guy
I agree, some promotion in the beginning can & will help. But if you have quality content your articles will start showing up in the SERPS. People go to Google, do a search, some of them clickthrough to my article, and it starts from there. I’m not disagreeing that promotion will help you speed up the process, it certainly will. But you can still succeed in building an authority site with no promotion at all.
Sarah Park
Very detailed instructions. With so many competitors out there, building authority can be really tough. But hard work and consistency, this isn’t impossible.
Very well summarized ! You know the best and the most strong line in this article that I liked is that Authority can not be bought – it is ‘earned’. This clearly indicates that we need to put in collective and right efforts in the right decision if we are serious about creating our authority in the online world. Your site iblogzone is quite an example as we can see the number of likes and share on your articles and the number of articles that you have written here. Congratulations DiTesco and keep up the great work !
All the best !
Hi Riz. Thanks for your nice words and for taking the time to voice out your thoughts.. I agree with all of them 🙂 Thanks for stopping by
Romeo
I think a brand is the most important representation of a business, without
it your business lacks identity. With thousands of brands surrounding you in the market,
you can expect at the least to be recognized by potential customers without a brand.
A brand is not just a sign, it has so many things attached to it,
thanks for sharing such an informative post.
Very great information.I really like your website. Please keep it up.
thanks..