Every business when you come right down to it is essentially about providing value in some form or other. Essentially you are somehow providing a client or customer with some kind of service or product and they will then find value you in this and as such be willing to pay for it. This of course earns you money as a business because you will find cheap ways to provide this value or this product, by looking at optimizing your manufacturing, or by finding other ways to decrease your overheads while at the same time increasing the value of what it is your offering by iterating and refining it or by increasing its perceived social value.
In a website your value is dictated by your information. That is what people are looking for when they come to your website and in exchange they provide payment by overlooking all the adverts on your page and occasionally clicking them. The good news is that as a webmaster you have very few overheads. Of course your main overhead is your hosting space, and then a few others such as the money you put into SEO, but ultimately this isn’t going to vary much between websites. So in order to increase your profits you won’t be looking at reducing overheads, but instead at increasing your value by iterating and refining your offering – and one way to do that is to give your website content more authority.
When someone visits your website they will do so in order to find out information that they can use to inform their decisions or that they can refer to for their essays and articles. In other words then, if our information lacks any credibility and if there’s any chance that it’s inaccurate, then it will be of little worth to them. And by the same token by making your content sound more authoritative you will be able to fend off the competitions who perhaps haven’t invested as much into developing a voice that people can trust.
So how do you go about increasing the authority of an article? There are multiple ways, but here we will list a few to get you started:
Proof Read
Spelling mistakes and typos will instantly damage the credibility of your content. If you can’t spell ‘information’ correctly, then what are the chances that you thoroughly researched everything you published on the page?
Use References
Using references is a great way to show that you did your research, while at the same time creating associations with other authoritative sites. If you write this in the same way as the professional journals too by using a smaller font in brackets, then you should be able to create the impression that you follow research guidelines.
Check Every Fact
It takes just one inaccurate fact for your people to start questioning your entire site. So make sure that you research everything fully and don’t take any gambles. If you aren’t sure? State that you aren’t sure.
Use a Good Design
A good web design may have little to do with the reliability of your content, but that won’t be the way your visitors see it if your page looks like a ten-year old designed it so invest here if you want to be taken seriously.
Latest posts by Ben Austin (see all)
- How to Make Your Articles Sound Authoritative - 01/21/2013
Hi Ben, With these tips, I dont see the reason why an article or a website shouldn’t command readers’ respect. By the way of buying your your products that is; if you are selling, subscribe to RSS feed or news letters and a million more… Thanks for taking your time out on this. i got informed.
I agree with you Emmanuel. This is a good read though. Thank you for your comment.
Thanks you for your comments Emmanuel & Derek. I am glad you enjoyed the post.