If your aim is to be on top of the search engine results, authority sites (also known as authority site status) are among the things you should consider. When it comes to search engine optimization, these sites make your task way faster compared to those sites that have not yet reached such status.

There are some sites that are authority sites already. But since they haven't gone through search engine optimization, search engines don't see them as such. It can be because they lack content or they didn't meet the links required to be recognized as authority websites.

When you make a search on many search engines using high traffic and very competitive keywords, you will recognize that the sites listed in the top 10 results are mostly authority sites. While this is not always the case, search engines always favor those sites that they describe as authority sites. They reward the said sites with high rankings.
Among the important elements of authority sites are:

Content
In general, authority sites include more content that other websites. They also have more web pages that are content-rich. Search engine spiders rejoice when feed on websites that are rich in quality content; these are sites containing many pages and more content in every page. This will work better when competing with a small site.

Links
Link coming from authority sites that are directed to your site will make it an authority site also. Generally, search engines provide incoming links from authority sites with more points as long as their keyword or keyword phrase is similar to yours.

If you already have a site, you can turn it into an authority site by doing the following:

Putting in more pages to your site.
Prior to this step, you need to do some research first. You should get some ideas and quality information from your competitor site. Study what your competitors are doing and how they do it. While evaluating your competition, you sure will discover the reasons why these sites have outrun you in search engine rankings. Once you found this out, you can do necessary actions.

Placing more content to the additional pages.
If you already know the kind of pages to add to your site, the next thing you have to do is to know what these pages need. When you need content, you can write them yourself or you can hire a freelance writer to do the task for you. Doing the content yourself means writing keyword-rich articles. If you think this is something you can't do, better hire a pro to do it. You can also choose to pick up content from other online places and just give the author's site a link.

Find authority link partners who want to link to your website.
After adding more content-rich pages, you have to look for other authority sites to be your link partners. You can do this by means of email. Not all will answer your request and will link to you so better make sure your content and website design are good enough to attract others to link to your site.

Optimize your pages properly for the search engines.
After adding more pages and content to your site, the next thing you should do is to optimize your site correctly for various search engines.

Submit your site to main search engines and directories.
By so doing, your website will be re-indexed and you can now proceed to the next step which is to improve your site's ranking.