Strategies to Improve The Page Authority of a Website – SMO

Increasing a website Page Authority in 2013 might be the most trending topic of SEO industry. It’s been a clear indication from Google that they will be ranking a website based on its Page authority and social media engagement. Getting good number of social shares to a website is no big deal, but what about the Page Authority? How do you increase it? What are the strategies? Why there is no much information about it? Wait! Wait! You don’t need to panic that much for such small things! Keep reading this article to gain some knowledge on how to increase your Page Authority with very little efforts.

Remember my previous article on How to Increase Domain Authority (DA)? If not, you can go through the article to gain some info on DA too. Because DA sometimes really matters when you are trying to take down a SEO competitor in search engines (especially Google). Coming to the Page Authority, what I have observed in the past few months is really surprising. I was successful enough to increase the Page Authority of a niche website from PA = 11 to PA = 27, which was quite decent enough. But what I came across this small change is really amazing. I saw amazing traffic jumping into the site from various sources, which include Google, Bing and Yahoo. I never bothered much about my niche sites, as they give me very little ROI.

Moz earlier announced their 2013 search ranking factors which clearly mentioned that Page Authority will have the highest amount of gravity when compared with any other. This is absolutely correct, as my niche traffic stats raised quite interestingly after the PA increase. Below is the screenshot of Moz ranking factors, which clearly shows the importance of Page Authority. After following few important strategies of link building, high quality content and social media engagement, my niche site PA booted up to 60% in just 2 months.

All you have to do is to simply follow these below techniques and wait for the traffic to grow exponentially. So lets get started in understand how Page Authority can be increased with few tweaks and secret strategies.

Secret Strategies to Improve The Page Authority via SMO:

You can build high page authority to a website by following white hat and grey hat techniques. Usually you won’t be able to get instant traffic by following white hat techniques, but will surely get good returns after 2 to 3 months of patience and hard work. Whereas grey hat techniques are quite easier to achieve and much smarter to implement. I usually go with these both strategies, which majorly depends on the type of niche, or the type of SEO client I deal with.

Remember that white hat techniques allow you to restrict yourself from manually pointing links to your website, whereas grey hat concepts will allow you to play around with back links and content production.

White Hat Techniques to Improve Page Rank:

First let’s discuss the most important metrics which will improve the page authority of a website. This completely depends on the type of niche your website is built on. Usually the white hat techniques include the following strategies.

High Quality Content

This is the first key point you need to remember when writing content on your website. Always make sure to provide high quality content which doesn’t go under 1000 words in total. I know people who say Google doesn’t care about how long or short you article is! Don’t listen to them if you want to get back-links from other referring websites in 2013. Your content should always engage people to discuss about it, no matter if none of the relevant websites link back to you.

It’s obvious that we don’t find much websites or bloggers who link back to our high quality articles, but what’s wrong in providing an engaging content to create some buzz online? I found majority of people ignoring my niche website to link back from their website, as they might feel to stay out of competition. Don’t worry about this concept, as you will automatically gain some traction in coming days. I found 3 websites linking back to my home page referring as source or via credit. There will be no limit to this article if I start talking about high quality content, as you might have already heard about the Google Hummingbird Algorithm and its core concepts.

Simple Tip: Try to find low competition keywords, which might help you to get good rankings and back-links in future.

High Quality Backlinks:

Getting back-links to your website is an amazing art, which majority of us fail initially. We know the best way of getting a backlink is through guest blogging. But how about get a high quality link without even guest blogging about it? That’s where the concept of high quality articles come into the picture. Just as discussed in High Quality Content, all you have to do is to write good content and wait for it to generate links automatically. If not you have to apply the standard approach of getting quality links through Guest Blogging.

Always make sure to get authority from an high authority pages, as the individual pages in a website will have an individual ranking. Which means, consider a website Pagerank is 5, this doesn’t mean that all the pages in that website will have PR 5. Majority of them will be zero, as the authority of that website will depend on its home page, when compared to individual pages. Similarly page authority, which is different for different pages throughout a website. Check out the above screenshot to differentiate between home page authority and individual page authority. (Here I’m using WebRank Toolbar 4.4 for Mozilla and MozBar 2.62 for Mozilla for instant results.

Good Internal Backlink Structure:

Your website should always have a deep inter linking structure, which you have to closely monitor every week. Identify the high authority pages within your website, and make sure to use them on fresh/newly built pages. This will boost your website traffic as internal linking works amazingly most of the times. Make sure your website doesn’t contain more than 3 layer linking system, as too many internal links might not help the website to rank better in Google.

You can use any Ahrefs.com, open site explorer or majestic seo to find the top authority pages within your website. Just like the above screenshot, always make an excel list of your highest authority pages to track down your individual page authority. This will help you to use them to pass link value to low or new pages within your website. I specifically use this for my clients, but nothing harmful in using with your personal blog. You should also add your most popular and targeted landing pages on the website home page to get the maximum page authority. You can find this strategy in Amazon, Flipkart and many other conversion based websites.

Social Media Engagement:

Using social media, you can increase your brand awareness, trust, traffic, relationships and authority. Some recent metrics proved that the page authority of a website can be improved with organic social media engagement. You should find people who are interested in your content and make them to share your website/pages organically. This is possible with by writing good content, sharing others articles/pages, engaging people with comments and interactions. In fact sometimes your website content should be shared less number of times, when compared to your friends and people you follow.

Some case studies suggest that your Twitter shared content should be 60% from other sources, 30% from your websites and 10% should be conversations. This really works, as my blogs and clients get massive traffic from Twitter on regular basis. And when it comes to Facebook, you should always make sure to engage your content with your friends and followers. Facebook looks at the following 3 factors when considering your article.

1. How often do you engage with your friends and look at their content.
2. How many likes, shares and comments you receive on a particular post.
3. How much you have interacted with this particular type of post in the past.

Following these above strategies will allow people to visit your website, which in turn helps your site to get amazing page authority. As we know the fact that Google looks at social media engagement, I guess its the right time to jump into social media optimization.

Frequent Updates:

Updating your website with fresh and engaging content can really improve your site Page Authority. You have to make sure to update your site at least once or twice in a week. This will make people to come back to your site with social media, bookmarks, email campaigns and gradually search engines. Never stop writing fresh content, as we this world has enough quality readers who come and spend little time on our websites.

If you have a static website, which doesn’t need much updates, then make sure to have a very good quality on it. The best example is a static website of any company/client, which doesn’t update the content that frequently. These cases are quite common, as some companies doesn’t require much social or search media engagement. Usually the bots doesn’t like websites with same content over a period of time, so why don’t you entertain them with some change of content? So what ever you write or update, make sure it goes viral on social media.

You should also make sure that your website navigation and loading speed are decent enough. Sometimes Google doesn’t like to show your pages with low performance. This might indirectly affect your page authority, but never late! Start improving your website page speed and loading time for good SERP’s.

Some Old Techniques to Improve Page Authority:

Apart from these above metrics, a website page rank can be improved with some standard SEO practices. Few of the very old techniques which worked for me are,

• High Quality Directory Submissions
• Professional Article Marketing
• Relevant & Quality Forums Posting
• Engaging Blog Comments in Authority sites.
• Question and Answer pages
• Quality Press Release Submissions
• Quality Social Bookmarking Submissions

And some other SEO strategies which might help you in improving your page authority. Remember that too much of anything is not good for your blog/website. Always make sure to follow a slow and steady process when improving your Page Authority. I have personally experienced a lot of change in SEOSiren.com page authority, which was improved from 23 PA to 36 PA in just 2 months with only 43 article on total. Hope this article helped you to improve your page authority and traffic. Let me know if you have any suggestions on queries on the above article.