Page 140 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

“And if you write an article on another website like The Wall Street Journal
or Fast Company, your credibility follows you wherever you go because the
citation of you and your name comes along with that. This approach harkens
back to traditional public relations where if you get positive exposure on other
credible sites it could directly help you move your own content because it sends
a cumulative signal to Google.”

Is there anything you can do to tip the odds in your favor and improve this
important rating? Watching SEO professionals duke it out over their best
guesses about Google’s rating system is a wonderful spectator sport. (It may
make a popular Olympic event some day: Google Wrestling.) Even though
Google gives us very few clues about the specifics in their formula, remarkably,
the SEO authorities are fairly aligned when it comes to the following factors that
ultimately result in site authority:

The number, quality, and relevance of incoming links pointing to your
content
Age of domain: Older sites have been “in the neighborhood” longer and
have had time to become trusted.
Size of the website and the pages of quality information found there
The number and quality of outgoing links: Who do you consider worth
linking to? In networking terms, “Who are your friends?” Are they the cool
kids who have authority with Google?
Indicators of spam: Spam is a broad term indicating unethical, or at least
questionable, activities meant to game the system. Do you own 10, 20, or
30 domains that link to each other? Are you pointing to sites known to be
spammy? Are you getting lots of links from spammy sites? Google frowns
on those practices.
Link diversity: In general, it’s better to have a smaller number of links
from a wider array of valuable sites than it is to have a large number of
incoming links from a handful of sites.
Anchor text diversity: It used to be a good practice to get everyone to link
back to your site using the keywords you want to rank on. Google wants to
see organic links, and people naturally use different keywords.
Speed: This is becoming increasingly important. If you have a slow
website, you’ll be penalized in rankings.
Temporary versus long-term traffic to the site: Is a site publishing
consistently and getting steady traffic over time? A site that has a sudden
spike in traffic may indicate it has purchased traffic, which is frowned upon
by Google.