By Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch

By now you know you need to focus on authority, your own, as well as relationships with other authorities. But what are the best strategies for developing authority?

From an SEO perspective, building authority only works if you have some sort of web presence for people to capitalize on. For the purposes of this column, it’s assumed that you have a blog, a social media presence, or both. Actually, you want to have both, because blogging and social media can reinforce each other in powerful ways:

Search engines try to measure personal (or organizational) authority the way people do. Your ability to obtain real links, fans, likes, +1s, or shares will be driven by that perception. In other words, don’t go buying likes, +1s, links, shares, or whatever.