Page 141 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

The accumulated page value: On a site with 50 pages, how many of them
are valuable?

Traffic metrics like returning visitors, page views per visitor, and time spent
on the site can all be increased by working on your Alpha Audience as described
in Chapter 5. Google likes to see engagement on your site, known as dwell time.
If someone finds you on Google, visits your site, and then immediately goes
back to Google, it’s a good indicator that Google didn’t deliver what the
customer wanted.

You can begin to see why site authority is the toughest of the six elements of
the Content Code to incorporate into a strategy because it takes a lot of hard
work and patience! And yet it’s too important to ignore.

Since Google doesn’t give you any way to quantify the value of your site,
independent companies have developed their own ratings which can serve as
indicators of performance on search results. One of the leading algorithms is the
free Domain Authority tool available on MOZ.com.1 Their estimate is a
logarithmic calculation of the authority of the site, meaning it’s easier to rise
from score of 30 to 35 than it would be to move from an 80 to 85 (out of a
possible 100).

Where do you start with your plan of attack? For that answer, I turn to Ian
Cleary, a Dubliner and the founder of Razor Social Media. Ian reliably presents
a clear-eyed view of such complex questions.

A plan to improve your authority

According to Cleary, the Domain Authority rating is an accumulation of all the
individual rankings of the pages on your site. So if you work on improving
individual pages, you’ll eventually start moving the domain number up, too.

Page Authority can be improved primarily by increasing the relevant links to
your site from pages that have high Page Authority themselves. If someone links
to you from a page that has a Page Authority of 70—and this is a relevant link,
meaning it’s in a similar industry—this link will help your Page Authority. In the
neighborhood analogy, it shows that people are getting to know you and
recommend you.

Here’s an explanation from Google: “Page Authority relies on the uniquely
democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an
individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page
B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”