The first time that many of us heard the advice about SEO gold was when Ed Dale, Professional Guru, shot an email out to his million-subscriber mailing list stating, “Become an authority, because that’s the only way to dominate your niche.” A few months later, his words are being proven true. Both SEOMoz and Majestic SEO are coming away from their analyses of post-Penguin Google code and are stating the same advice but with different interpretations.
That’s because the new flightless Google bird loves some things that Google has never shown quite so much love to before.
Mentions and Shares
When your content is brand new the Penguin gives enormous power to social media. If your content is extremely popular where people are sharing it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest, you’re going to see action. If you want your content to have staying power, you’re going to need a few more items.
Authoritative Links
Google has always loved a good backlink, but today’s standards are different from the past. The new Google looks for two things: first, are links that use your product, service, or your company’s name as anchor text called brand signals and second, are links that use quotes from your content or your content’s title as anchor text called match links. These two kinds of backlinks are SEO gold in the current environment, even more so if they come from an authoritative source. But the easiest way to land authoritative links is to get authorities’ eyes on your content, which means getting the mentions, shares, and traffic.
The path to success is to “create awesome material, feed it to your hungry social network, get authoritative sites eyes’ on it, and get backlinks from them.” Just take a moment to stop and think about the groups in your niche that do those exact items naturally. There’s one simple way to describe these people and groups, and that is that they are the authorities.
As you would have guessed, the people who consistently produce the best content are at the top of the SERPs. If you want to beat them — join them.
