There are almost no certainties in this world. Especially in the world of Marketing. How many units will we sell? How many people will even see our product? Or how many people will visit our page and find out who we are? Even these questions lack absolute answers. That is why we create estimations. With a little bit of math and prediction, we can minimize our uncertainty to give us a projection of our results. Fortunately, the SEO world has also provided a form of estimation. This method, called “Page Authority,” will help you to more accurately determine your SEO branding. We at MyCity Social stay up to date on all the new tricks and tools to help our clients get the best SEO services in Fort Lauderdale. Read on to learn how this new tool, Page Authority, will help in your search engine marketing.

 

How Page Authority Helps With SEO Branding

Page Authority is a concept developed by MOZ to determine a page’s ranking in comparison to others. To do so, your Page Authority is rated by a value between one to 100. The higher your score, the higher your page will rank on search engines. However, this score is not conceived linearly but logarithmically. This means getting a score to rise from 20 to 30 is a lot easier than from 60 to 70. Moz uses what is called a “Mozscape Web Index” to produce data by which it measures your page’s authority. However, as the algorithm changes, your page authority may fluctuate. Therefore, it is prudent to compare your score to your closest competitors, rather than to achieve a definite scoring. Now, knowing what Page Authority is and a bit about how it works, you may wonder how it will help you.

 

As stated above, your score is set in comparison to the pages of other sites that are similar to your own. Therefore, you can use this index to find out how well your page may rank if someone searched a term based on your page’s topic. Moz recommends you also view the score of your closest competitor, so you can see how you compare. If you find you are not scoring highly enough, you could analyze your competitors’ pages to find out why they would rank more highly than your page. With this tool at your disposal, you will be able to make educated decisions on how to gain the upper hand over your competition. However, the Page Authority does not just leave you with only a score.

 

You can acquire your Page Authority by checking Domain Authority with Link Explorer, with Mozbar, Moz’s SEO toolbar (which is free), or in the SERP Analysis section of the Keyword Explorer. Moz has many ways for you to get this information. When you have it, you will gain specific information on what factors affect your score. Things such as load time, which affects your ranking, are displayed in your results. As Google has a ranking system that considers how long your page takes to load as a factor, Moz’s Page Authority, which tries to determine search engines’ perception of you, will also consider that factor. Therefore, no need to guess what you can do to help your page get a better score (as long as you remember that the better your score is, the harder it is to increase it).  But don’t worry, we also have a very simple way to increase your page authority. The key to adding authority to your search engine marketing efforts is to add external links to your pages.

 

Getting the Most Out of External Links

So, to get a specific definition of an external link, it is any hyperlink that points to any domain other than the one it’s on. Your goal is to have external links pointing to your page. To be clear, that means someone else’s website needs a link that will bring someone to your website.

 

Now, you may wonder how these links will help your search engine marketing efforts. Well, top SEOs believe external links greatly benefit your ranking power. Why? They are considered third-party votes. This gives your website a different level of confirmation than your own internal links. For example, if you are looking for good pizza and want a recommendation, your friend would be a more credible resource than the cashier or manager at a pizza shop. The reason is that the employees of a pizza shop will, of course, speak well of their pizza. They want you to buy it. Your friend has no such obligation, so you’d believe your friend. By the same token, search engines are more ready to believe your page has value if another page references it. If your mouth isn’t watering for how to get the best external links, it should be.

 

Here are factors that affect how effective these external links will be:

• Trustworthiness – Simply, the more credibility the linking page has, the more credibility you will receive from its recommendation. If the source page is well-established and known for giving reliable information, getting a thumbs-up from there would greatly help your score.
• Popularity – For some reason, if a celebrity says something, many people will believe it. In the same way, your page will gain more positivity if the site that referenced yours was popular.
• Content – I could have mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to save it for here. The relevancy between what the site was discussing and your page holds weight, as well. As we have said, “Content is king.” Therefore, you want your page to actually relate to the page that brought viewers to you. On that note, you want to pump as much value into your page as possible.
• Anchor text – Basically, what does the link actually say? One example, if your page happened to be about baking a cake, you’d hope the person linking to your page would use “cake recipes” as hyperlink text.
• The number of links your referral makes to your page in the source page – For example, if I’d mentioned only one of your pages five times in this blog.
• The variations of anchor text used to link to your page – If the source page mentions you five times, hope “cake recipes” is not the only term used.
• The ownership relationship between the target and source domains – Do you and your source referral talk about the same things? This is useful when combined with trustworthiness and popularity, as gaining accolades from a site that gained credibility and popularity within the same world as your site will probably give the most benefit.

 

In summary, you want to build content so valuable that a credible, popular website references your page at least once. However, I should mention that you don’t have to wait for someone to find your content valuable to capitalize on external links. You can find someone who writes blogs and pitch your page to see if your content is valuable to that person’s audience. If it is, that person may write a blog and reference you. The cost: probably for you to do the same in return. Of course, if your goal is to build your reputation, being known for repaying such favors may help you gain more external linking opportunities.

 

Things to Keep in Mind Regarding Increasing Your Page Authority

After learning what Page Authority is and how to use it, you must be raring to go and increase your score as much as you can. However, there are a few disclaimers you should know before you set off on your journey of SEO dominance.

• Your goal is not to get a score of 100 – Aside from the fact that getting from 60 to 70 is extremely difficult, aiming for exceptionally high numbers is impractical. Why? Because scores show competition. To explain, having a score of 100 means your SEO dominance is similar to Amazon and Apple. Not likely, as they probably have more money and resources and reputation than you.
• Aim for scores that are higher than your closest competition – Instead, you need to find companies that are in your market and are similar in scale, and try to get your score to overcome theirs. If your cake competitor has a score of 50, you want 55.
• Your score may fluctuate – Moz constantly updates its algorithms, so your score may not always be what you’d seen. However, there are other factors that can influence your score. Such as:
  • Your page earning links that aren’t connected to Google’s rankings.
  • Moz using more or less of your domains.
  • Your authority being on a lower end and thus being more affected by changes.
  • High-authority sites making substantial growth and affecting the scaling process.

 

Contact Us

New tools are added often to help businesses elevate their SEO capabilities. However, to keep up to date on all of them would be a challenge for any company not specialized in this field. That is why we at MyCity Social offer the best support in SEO branding and SEO services in the Fort Lauderdale area. Contact us to utilize our team of specialists today.