When can you consider yourself an authority website?

That is common with authority sites. You get a majority of traffic through some posts rather than the main page.

I started a site two months ago. Last month it was getting about 200 visitors a day.
Like you, I was getting about 80% of my traffic to 3 of my pages.

What did I do? I built 3 more pages for each page that was getting traffic. Optimizing for the same keyword, with a slightly different title and a different article body of course.

Now, I'm getting 500+ visitors a day, and it looks awesome to see 3 of my pages listed at #1, #2, and #3 on Google. All the traffic is still coming from those 3 keywords.

Take advantage of your hot keywords.

What about your On Page SEO? Is that 100% OK? That is an important place to start.

Make sure to build internal links with the keywords in anchor text to the inner pages.

I think you should not focus on building individual external links to all articles - that would not look natural. Focus on some long tail keywords with good traffic and low competition.

Once your site is more established, you should be able to see more of the existing content gaining ranks as well.

Continue to do external link building - you can do like 60-70% to the front page and the rest to different inner pages.

The key is diversity - different types of links from blog commenting, forums, web 2.0, social bookmarking etc. Also variations in the anchor text.

Some good juice authority links and some Wiki and .edu links is also good.

Another good idea is to do some reverse engineering - look at the sites that have the highest rankings in your niche, how are they build up, how much content, which kind of content.

Also have a look at their back links - that would give you an idea how hard it would be to grab their spot.

Good luck! :-)

An authority site, content-wise, comes from that. Boatloads of
indexed content. That's the basic definition of an authority site.

You actually bring up a good point about pages. I have many
pages indexed, but I know only a handful bring cash. It's
not rocket science. Those pages are on student loans, mortgages,
and insurance. The rest of the articles, well, they add to the traffic,
authority, trustworthiness, linkbait, traffic-funnel,etc.

Oh sure, some of the others do a few bucks here and there,
but no doubt about the fact that only a few articles bring home the bacon.

I would suspect most websites are like that.

Paul

If you're using wordpress, there are plugins that will do the internal keyword linking for you. Here's an example: WordPress › Keyword Strategy Internal Links « WordPress Plugins

I have not used that plugin, but did a quick search. If you have to do it manually, then it's going to be a big process.

Do you have a sitemap? Google can't find those pages if you don't have a sitemap(and also dont have keyword links).

Hi,

I do have a sitemap and I already am using a plugin that links internal, based on tags and titles of posts and pages.

@ LovBoa

Great advice. I will test it out, because it really makes sense.

So what I can conclude so far is that you become an authority by having a lot of unique content indexed, but that doesn't mean that your content is good (if they don't get links).

I would generally ssay when you achieve these;

- ranking for more then 30 keywords that are semi matched.
- ranking for at least 5 keywords that are not matched.
- more then 50 pages of content.

Hi OwnerGolan,

I think that's pretty doable. But do you have to rank for those 30 keywords by doing link building, or naturally?

Authority sites will draw traffic from thousands of long tail keywords. Just about any content they add will have the potential to rank well. Some examples would be livestrong, about.com, amazon, etc.

One thing you can try, since you have a lot of content, is to create hub pages within your site. These are like categorical landing pages that link to a related group of content pieces. Write a description about each article and link to it...then you can promote the hub page more vividly on your site. Doing this will also make it easier to get backlinks pointing to a wider scope of content.

The best piece of advice I can give about backlinking, is to go round some sites like yours offering link exchange this can be a great way to land a few decent links. Another thing is I find aiming my backllinks at my main page carrying it through to my inner pages aswell, or though I do sometimes link to posts I have made aswell.