What makes a site an “authority site?”
1. Original content: this is a MUST for authority sites. There is not a single website on the web that does exceptional traffic and income without original, high quality content.
2. High Traffic: This goes without saying but one caveat is “the highest amount of traffic available for a certain niche.” High traffic for a small niche will be a far different amount than a large niche with hundreds of thousands of searches per month.
3. Beautiful: Authority sites are functional and elegant in navigation and design. The word beauty, in this example, means simple design that says out of the way of the content and goals of the publisher for visitor interaction with the site.
4. Dynamic: Authority sites today are at least partically if not totally dynamic. Static html is no longer an acceptable platform to run your content on. RSS is a must for subscribers with RSS agregators and for content syndication.
5. Self-Promoting: When new content goes up on an authority site, the web is put on notice through pinging, tagging, autodiscovery, and updated RSS feeds on partner sites. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t have an authority site.
6. Self-Optimized: Authority sites are optimized for the search engines by virtue of being optimized for their visitors. After basic SEO is taken into consideration (and included as a minimum requirement of a good content management system) the publisher of an authority site should not have to actively optimize for the engines other than writing content that speaks to the top keywords (topics) in their niche. Visitor Optimization replaces Search Engine Optimization.
7. Source Material: A good authority site is often cited by bloggers and others because it is the source of most of the good information in a niche. This leads to thousands of voluntary links to an authority site, which leads to higher traffic volume.
8. Obvious Expert: The content in an authority site is seen as expert material by the majority of the market it serves. Authority site content cannot be faked or be 100% 3rd party content syndicated from elsewhere.
9. Properly Monetized: A good site will produce good income. An authority site will produce stellar income. A combination of advertising, affiliate products, and exclusive products and services are the driving force behind most authority sites earning the maximum potential in their markets.
10. Updated Often: Authority sites have new information that is important to their visitors all the time. This information need not be 100% original, but original content is part of the mix that makes authority sites.
Given the above, what’s an authority site look like?
Here are some you probably already have in your bookmarks:
1. About.com
2. Wired
4. Drudge Report (TOTALLY breaks the beautiful design rule!)
Authority Sites In Training
The sites below are all authority sites in the making. Looking at the future of authority site building gives valuable insight into what people are doing to build for Web 2.0.
Watch the sites below as they take over their niches in the coming months. All the authority site factors are present.
1. Lady o’ Golf
7. Nursing Careers
8. MP4 Soup
10. Anti Aging
11. SurfKooks
Finally, it no longer takes massive investment capital and an in house programming and sales staff to create high-performance authority websites.
As the hyper-complicated tools the traditional autority sites use become more accessible and written for end users rather than geeks, we will start to see more and more sites like above taking over niches riddled with static html sites and yesterday’s content management and marketing technology.