Google Loves Authority Too

We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important. ~ Sergey Brin, Co-Founder, Google

It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculating a website’s importance. ~ Larry Page, Co-Founder, Google

To rank well, build a site so fantastic that it makes you an authority in your niche. ~ Matt Cutts, Head of Google Web Spam Team

So… people respond to and follow important people more than others. And Google ranks important pages and sites higher than others.

We may be on to something with this authority thing.

If you’ve been around the online marketing scene for a while, you may be familiar with the paradox of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the art and science of ranking high in the search engines (mostly Google) for the words people are using to find what you have to offer.

It boils down to this:

If people think you’re important, so will Google.

This perplexes many webmasters and online marketers, since they wonder how people will consider them important when people use search engines to find things online in the first place. How are you important if you’re invisible in the search engines to start with?

And how does Google know people think you’re important anyway?

For one, they know because people link to you, and Google follows those links to index and rank web pages. And thanks to services such as the Google Toolbar, Analytics, Feedburner, Google Reader, Gmail and others that keep you logged-in to your Google account, the Big G has an enormous amount of usage data that shows what people actually spend time doing online.

So, there’s that. But how do you kick it off?

To get people to link to you and generally pay attention in the first place, you have to start thinking about authority in a different sense. Luckily, any dictionary will get you on the right path with the other definition of authority.

Content and Citation: How to Build Online Authority