What do you do if you have a website that is suffering from lack of authority pages, from poor site design, and or poor site architecture? How do you SEO pages to increase the authority value of particular pages? With a strategic plan, you can make on-page improvements that are repeatable, scalable, and measurable. In many cases, the site architecture and link structure may be outside of your control, but that does not mean that well defined search engine optimization tactics can’t improve the page performance to increase lead conversion. While site architecture and internal and external linking structure may play one of the most important roles in determining how well a site projects authority, a finely tuned page can improve performance on its own merits. A powerfully written authority page also leads visitors down a path of conversion.
An authority page is also known as an overview page or landing page in the e-commerce world. Think of an authority page like this, “If a visitor or search engine visits your website, what’s it the most important thing about your site that you want them to know?” If all of your pages appear the same, how will that visitor or search bot know what’s important? If you try to follow the same best practice processes on every page whenever possible, you will be building a quality content site. The following guidelines listed below aren’t hard-and-fast rules, nor are they exhaustive. However, they do reflect site quality principles to incorporate into your content that may promote distinguishable ranking factors helping your page establish authority. Once again, this search engine optimization only covering the content structure, not the linking strategy or website architecture.
Provide relevant and substantial unique content. This is where it all begins. Without good body copy, it really does not matter what the page design looks like. Make sure the page contains the most useful and accurate information available about the product or service being offered.
Is it Relevant? Make sure that your authority page is relevant to your main targeted keywords and your body.
Have enough content. If a ‘normal’ page on your website averages 250-350 words of copy, and your page if your authority is more important than a regular page, then it stands to reason that your authority needs more content than an average page. In general, build pages that contain substantial and useful information to the end user.
What’s on a well designed web page? Not all design elements will be on all pages or web sites, or should they be. Your best pages (the good ones) may include;
1. Choosing a Primary Keyword. Define the primary key that your content will be optimized for. This will be the main topic of the content on your page. Look to improve primary keyword density but do not overdo it. A nice density goal for the primary keyword is around 1.0 0% range more or less.
2. Pick out additional topic keywords. Make a list of topics that match your keyword since the subject matter. For example, if your primary keywords are: Digital photography, pick a few (low competition) theme keywords that you can easily bring your web copy to: Digital camera with printer, Kodak Easy Share digital camera, etc. When your content is well optimized for your primary keywords, you will also get traffic from theme keywords. Using your theme keyword (s) 1 to 3 times on each side. Since search engines are constantly evolving, it is better to spread your content rather than follow the exact same plan for every piece of web content.
3. Using the keyword synonyms. When you write about a specific topic, it is easy to get carried away and include the primary keyword too many times throughout the article. That is true synonyms are, use them.
4. In your first paragraph – Include your primary keyword. The first paragraph of your content is critical. Include your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the first paragraph as possible. Also it is a good idea to include a theme keywords somewhere in the first paragraph as well.
5. Prominence – The goal of good keyword coverage. If your keyword density is too low, you can not get the search engine rankings you might like. Remember, you always have multiple pages with the same primary keyword to a achieve ranking position in search engine rankings to get out and beat your competition.
Content analysis before optimization
Word count 423
Primary keyword density 0%
Theme keyword density 0%
Keyword prominence 0%
Content analysis after optimization
Word count 880
Primary keyword density 0.56%
Theme keyword density 1.02%
Keyword prominence 51.47%
Part of this plan was to use the targeted data goals to confirm that any changes made actually made a difference. After only one week of tracking the data points for the newly created authority page here are the improvements. Let’s keep an eye on it, but continue working our plan.
% Visits total site
Before change: May 27, 2011 – Jun 2, 2011 2.37%
After change: Jun 3, 2011 – Jun 9, 2011 3.31%
% Change 39.29%
To Contact Page
Before change: May 27, 2011 – Jun 2, 2011 18.18%
After change: Jun 3, 2011 – Jun 9, 2011 20.00%
% Change 10.00%
Mastering Grassroots SEO marketing is often as simple as just searching online for SEO tips and the best SEO tools. While the internet has a tremendous amount of real information, it also provides a vast amount of useless data as well. Grassroots SEO is all about a variety of real information to get you started down the road to success. After all, search engine optimization is a continuous journey, not an event. 
