You're Not Making Any Money Online without Authority

Made you wonder, didn't I?? If you read my post from a couple of days ago you saw that I assigned you to do some research by typing in an example keyword phrase 'How to Make Money Online'. If you did what I asked you, you probably wondered what you should really be looking for that defines their site's success in the search engines. I bet you felt that slight pang of jealousy that your website isn't in that top 10 list (heck, I know I did).

Many of you have probably dropped some real dollars on some ebooks and read a thing or two about search engine optimization to guess that these sites have high quality backlinks from other sites that also rank well in the search engines. And, as we all know TRAFFIC = MONEY - so, everyone's goal is to get traffic. However, (and this is a BIG however) that is not necessarily the answer to getting top rankings in Google or Yahoo (and most recently - Bing). Bada Bing! Read that last line again.

Ok, hold all of your preconceptions about SEO because you're probably submitting articles, adding entries to link directories, creating profiles in social sites, etc. etc. - i.e. - wasting valuable time! There is one secret I'm going to spill - and that is your site's authority!

By authority I mean that the content you've provided in your site or blog has relevant meaning and important to human eyes based on your key topic. Guess what? Google is trying to view your site the same way with human glasses - and, guess what - they're not rose colored.

What you might be thinking is that Google is judging your site based on the number and popularity of sites linking back to you. True, somewhat - but, there are a boatload of PhDs at Google trying to make it read your site like a human - yes, a human. That means reading from top to bottom, left to right, scanning and determining if the content has relevance (remember that term - it is important) and authority to the topic at hand - that is, your web page.

So what does that really mean? If you think about this it is about the perception the search engines have of your content demonstrating that you have the appropriate knowledge of the topic or niche. That is why you'll see sites with a significant amount of detailed content focused on specific keywords ranking high.

Recently, however, I have discovered sites that rank in page 1 of Google that do not have many backlinks, and, those backlinks are not highly ranked. I was literally floored when I found this. Why would these sites get high rank for the search term?

In one example I found a site ranked #4 of 1.4M results that had 6 pages with 717, 755, 519, 211, 373 and 12 words in each page respectively. The pages spoke directly to the main topic (page 1) and associated topics in pages 2-5 with page 6 being a contact page. It had 28 backlinks with all being simple web directories, whois and alexa rank. Pretty simple - but, it was authoritative. It reads well, has the main topic as the page title and subtopics / subheadings with content.

What this demonstrates is that getting ranked high in Google may not be as hard as you think - just as long as you build your pages in a human readable, authoritative manner. Want a great example? Just take a look at how Wikipedia is structured and you'll get a clue on what you need to do (more on this later). There's no telling how long it will take Google to get you to a high position - be patient - you should be able to build niche sites that capitalize on this and make money easier than before.