My Basic Outline Of An Authority Site

This is my outline of what an authority site looks like.



The kind that engages readers, gets them to share with friends and Google loves.

Whether you are building your personal blog or affiliate review site.

I know some of you might have a different opinion but that is how my sites are generally built and making me passive $.

Whether it is Blogger or Wordpress blog.

If you looked at the blogs of successful people like Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Eben Pagan and Mike Filsaime, they more or less have most of these elements in place.

 

I'll have to agree with you. I see this quite often. Thanks for sharing this.

 

"they more or less have most of these elements in place."

LOL! Don't forget a large crowd of followers regardless of how their site is. I think their hard work and years of dedication will have people follow them even if they had poor laid out templates that were for free.

I'm not privy to the "proper" way of how a blog should be. I do know however the proper structure of how a sales site should be. Term authority site is a broad term whose definition could be argued by many. I do not believe the looks nor the structure of a site makes it an authority site, but how it performs on search terms and the amount of traffic it draws through all methods of online marketing. PR value and Alexa ratings mean little to me. It's how the site is doing monetarily, because that's the main point of having a website for most anyway.

People are not going to share a site based on how it's structured and Google isn't going to crawl and index a site based on how it looks either. LOL! Both "friends" and Google are going to "share" the site based on it's content. "Content Is King" will most likely always be a mainstay on how a site performs through the SERPs and how viewers take action on whether to share the site or not.

While I'm not a blogger, I do disagree with the top part of the structure laid out above. People need a captivating reason to stay on the site and read further. Studies show that males only spend a few seconds on a site before they determine to stay and read further or leave. Females have 1/2 that amount of patience and will cut out sooner, so with both you do not have much time to get their attention and having a slider or welcome message isn't enough for me to stick around.

If it were me laying out a site for blogging, like the mainstay and basics of creating a sales page, it has to have a strong headline and sub headline to captivate the reader's attention and want to make him/her to read further. A slider or welcome message would do little to help that cause. It's the headline that gets scooped up by Google if it's deemed a good search match, not a slider or welcome message.

Everything else structured, illustrated, looks good to me. I believe it's worth noting and to model from. The carrot that's dangled to get people to give up their email has to be inviting. If it's compelling, they get my email.

Thank you for the diagram. Makes things easier to visualize and understand when it's right in front of you.

Aurelius

 

It is important to make that first impression as soon as possible, I agree.
Having said that, as you are talking about an authority site I do think people are interested in the Welcome which gives a bit of background and credence to the author. It could go in a sidebar and is worth spending some time on.

 

Very nice page layout.

 

Just my two cents as a web developer: Sliders can at times be problematic for mobile users and most people don't watch past the first two slides - which begs the question: If you only get two slides, do you need a slider?

But there's a difference between sliders for design and sliders for content. Sliders are more effective when they're the component of the overall design - like fancy WP themes on ThemeForest love to show off. Sliders for content (like blog posts) aren't that effective. Imho you're better off using the actual post content or feature image.

Looks good though - I like seeing people who map out what they need ahead of time; it saves so much hassle when you're setting the site up or working with a developer.

 

In my opinion you could try to make some split tests over your idea: build two similar websites and grab very similar WP themes based on the layout you designed.

Then, install crazyegg on both websites, and let them running for a month or two.

Maybe you could invest a bit of money to purchase paid traffic sending targeted visitors to your sites.

At that point, the "heat map" generated by crazyegg should tell you which layout works better.

Then, scale it up: throw away the less performing site and build a new one trying to "beat" the previous winner. Of course it depends a lot on type of niche.

 

I agree, I also build my websites like the picture you greated! Works great!