In an excellent article called “How Much Is Involved in Building an Authority Site” (in website-designs.com), author Steve Cartwright notes that “Authority websites have the potential to generate a tremendous amount of money, but the downside is that they can take a tremendous amount of work. However, a niche website that isn’t an authority website is almost as hard to keep updated anyway. It’s difficult to continually produce enough quality content to keep the search engines indexing your website enough so that your website remains at the top of the search results.” True, though not so difficult for individuals for whom the goal of websites and social-media is professional reputation and branding rather than financial profit. For owners of business websites, though,
How long each aspect of the authority site takes to develop will depend on your skill levels, as well as your budget. If you have the funds to hire out various aspects of the site building such as the web design and even the content creation, you’ll be able to rank higher faster. But, building an authority website still takes time. The way in which Google decides that your site is an authority site is by the age of the domain name, incoming links referencing the website, and the amount of relevant, high-quality content on the website.
When starting an authority website some experts will tell you that you need lots and lots of short highly focused articles. Each one of these should be focused on one particular topic and should include basis search engine optimization. The sole purpose of these articles is to gain indexing within the search engines. On top of this you’ll need to include some longer articles, these are your main authority articles and the idea is that these build on the grown work done by the SEO type articles. Authority articles tend to be longer than those written for search engine optimization alone, there sole purpose is to educate the audience on a particular topic. When I started Website Designs, I decided that I wanted to concentrate on lots and lots of authority articles, this is why you will not find any short SEO type posts on this website. …
If you work really hard, you can have a website up and running in about 30 days (sometimes less) depending on your own skills in terms of creating a website and graphics. You can fill it with 50 pages of content to get started, and then work on keeping it updated with fresh content on a part-time basis, but understand from the onset that it takes lots of work this is why most people don’t do it and many give up before they are successful. Spend at least equal time promoting the website as you do adding content to it. Expect it to take at least 120 – 180 days to start seeing a marked increase in traffic from search engines. Then spend time each week keeping the momentum going.
