How to Increase Domain Authority of Your Website?

Domain Authority, or simply DA, often heard in digital marketing terms, refers to the metric that implies the authority your website has. If the website has a higher DA, then there are more chances for your website to rank in the search results (SERPs), thereby building high organic traffic. This metric was initially created by Moz, however, other firms have also developed various other equivalent metrics that can rank the domains depending on certain factors with ratings ranging between 0&100. 

Along with the increase in domain authority, you get more search engine ranking and can receive higher web real traffic. With DA, you can measure the SEO efforts and make a comparison between competitors’ sites and the strength of your websites. 

The content marketing team uses the social bookmarking sisters with high DA to build useful website backlinks, and get new customers. To amplify the Domain authority, blog commenting has also been widely used. Various submission techniques such as article submission have also been used to improve Domain authority and attract great traffic.

What is the Domain Authority of a website?

As discussed, DA is defined as a scale of scores between 0 and 100 that can give exact predictions on how great the websites will rank according to the search engines. The higher the domain authority, the better how it gets ranked.  

DA can’t always be as valid as the extent to which Google has understood about your website. This is why you can see some websites with low authority but have a good ranking score in Google. Apart from the popular submission techniques like image submissions, you have various methods to improve website DA.

Things to note about DA

• The Domain Authority doesn’t consider Google penalties. When a domain has a Google penalty, it loses rankings, but this is not considered by the DA. So DA will be high even if the domain is subjected to a penalty.

• Domain Authority takes care of 40 factors only whereas you can see that Google’s algorithm uses hundreds of ranking factors.

• You cannot change the DA score easily. This isn’t an aspect you can change on the website now and view the improvement quickly.

• Domain Authority depends upon a logarithmic scale, which means that it is easy to boost your DA score from say, 30 to 40, however it is a bit harder to move from 70 to 80. It becomes harder as you move towards a higher scale.

• DA keeps changing continuously hence it is not something you can use to calculate the SEO performance after time, but it is a metric used to make domain comparisons.

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What is an ideal Domain Authority Score?

We must consider many factors while calculating the domain authority. For instance, Google, Microsoft, and Apple own websites with great DA scores, ie. between 95 -100.

However, if you have a new website, then you build a low DA, which is roughly 10-20. It is effortless to trigger the DA of the site if it ranges between 30 and 40 while compared to 70 and 80 as discussed. You can analyze the scores of DA in the following ranges.

• <30 means poor 

• 30-40 means below average 

• 40-50 means average

• 50-60 means good

• 60-70 means very good

• >80 means excellent

Domain Authority helps you build the website performance in the SERPs. Hence, it is great if you use it to compare the DA with other websites with a strong presence in SERPs, followed by slowly trying to increase the Domain Authority to make it rank high.

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How is Domain Authority Calculated?

You can calculate Domain Authority by taking care of the important factors as follows:

• MozRank: This evaluates the number of sites that link to a particular web page. It can also assess the website quality that contributes to the site with an inbound link.

• Link Profile: It comprises both internal and external links earned from the pages. If the specific post is linked to the websites with high authority and linked back by the highly credible websites, you can build a valuable score.

• Root Domain: The unique backlinks are also checked in addition to the healthy link profile. For instance, if you have more than 100 links, but if all of them are from a single website, Moz considers them as a single root domain. Hence building links from sites is important.

• MozTrust: To check the relevance and extent of trustworthiness of a website that links to your pages are checked by Moz. For example, imagine you obtain a link from a particular governmental website or university page, chances are that you can get a higher score.

• Structure of website and User-friendliness:  To get a high DA, it is important to make sure that the site has an easy structure which makes it great for search engines to crawl your pages. This can also offer good user experiences to the visitors.

How to find the DA of a website?

To check out your website and its Domain Authority score, you may visit the Moz Domain Analysis SEO tool. Enter the domain and observe the result. You can check the Domain Authority easily with Link explorer, the SERP section in the Keyword Explorer, or Mozbar. 

Domain Authority Vs Page Authority: Are they the same?

Domain authority and Page authority are similar, but when considering the domain-specific metrics, PA utilizes the signals which are confined to a particular web page.

The PA tells the strength of a specific web page and its capability of getting ranked in search engines. When a website has several high authority pages, it will also exhibit more DA scores.

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Methods to Improve Domain Authority 

1. Focus on Off-Page SEO

The high-quality links can be built with Directory Submission sites which are one among widely known Off-Page SEO techniques. The most essential metric out of everything else is the link profile creation. When websites have a clean and strong profile, their DA scores will be higher than others with weak link profiles. How do you say which is a strong link profile!? 

Here are the factors that make a strong link profile for a website.

• The incoming links, which are called backlinks from high-authority sites.

• Incoming links arising from related sites

• No low-quality backlinks

• There are links from several unique domains

Now, how to scale up the link profile?

You can improve your link profile, which is otherwise called off-page SEO, and it is defined as the set of processes to earn great links that can contribute to your rankings eventually. To build a strong link profile, you may improve the Domain Authority, with the following processes:

• Do a link audit, remove bad links and broken links from the profile. 

• Contact those website owners directly, and get them to remove the link or ask them to add a nofollow links, to nullify the link.

• Build a stronger link profile with relevant links.

• Grab real links from similar or related websites, which can be the most tricky part of SEO.

What are the ways you can enhance link building?

A natural link-building strategy is an ideal way to attract potential link growth from various related websites. When somebody visits your website, goes through the content, and links it with some articles of theirs, this is a natural link-building technique. To work on this, you need to publish content that is worthy enough to be linked.

Relevant content can persuade people to make yours get linked with their content.  Building natural backlinks is a highly useful technique, but you need to be patient, it will take time.

Another ideal scenario is blogger outreach. Contact the webmasters and shout out to let them be aware of your existence. This can let you improve the possibilities of them linking your content or pages to their articles or blog posts. Various techniques like infographics submission are also in demand to improve visibility.

2. On-Page SEO 

You can improve the domain authority by working on on-page Search Engine Optimization or simply, on-page SEO strategy.

This is related to optimizing both content and the page. The factors to be noted for on-page optimization are:

• Title and description optimization

• Good use of H1 and H2 headings in the content

• The SEO permalinks and URL structure

• Optimizing the images, media, and video for search engines.

• Naturally having keywords in the content, ie. No keyword stuffing.

• Including internal links into the content which is the best SEO technique

• Content formatting to get it ranked in the featured snippets.

Above on-page and off-page SEO, what matters the most for search rankings is the high-quality content. Even if video submission techniques are made, you can also opt for methods to improve content relevance, persistent content upgrades, and building original content are also important like having link-worthy content.

3. Improve Technical SEO

This is usually concerned with the low-level SEO operations and when you have the technical SEO done at the start, then there is no need to deal again with them.

Nevertheless, when the technical SEO is incorrect, then it can create a negative impact while your rankings and Domain Authority is considered.

Here is a checklist that you must cross-check while managing the technical SEO:

• Get your website registered with tools such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster.

• Build and optimize the XML sitemap for your site and encourage Google submission.

• Monitor the robots.txt settings, followed by ensuring that the search engine spiders will be able to easily crawl the website with no issues.

• Migrate the website to HTTPS

• To support the search engines and help them to understand your contest, add the structured schema of information.

• Let every page have well-aligned menus.

• Use Hreflang tags especially for multilingual web pages.

4. Build Mobile Friendly Websites

Making relevant websites mobile-friendly is something mandatory in today’s scenario. Since mobile searches are on a higher side than desktop users, and Google works based on a mobile-first index, it is important to have a mobile-friendly site. When you don’t have a responsive site, this can hurt the entire domain score.

You can run a Mobile-friendly test by Google to check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not. Google also provides a detailed report with the best recommendations for building a mobile-ready website.

 5. Boost Your Page Speed

The quality signals when Google ranking algorithm is concerned, constitute the page speed. If websites can load quickly, they have more advantages than slow-loading websites. Enhancing speed will improve search engine ranking score, DA, and make a higher user experience that can result in more conversions kike leads, sales, downloads, sign-ups, etc.

You can’t easily overcome page speed issues unless you are a developer or technical-oriented person. You can check for certain factors shown below to enhance the page loading speed:

• Avoid unnecessary plugins

• Go for plugin upgrades 

• Ask the hosting provider for a server performance report, and upgrade to a high-performing server if needed.

• You can go for a caching plugin

• Go for image size optimization

• Use the streaming services for videos

• Go for a Content Delivery Network if you have huge files and images, like CSS files. 

6. Improve the Social Signals

Social signals are not the factor of Google ranking algorithm, but there is a link between the pages that have high Google ranking and the social signals.

Here are some ways to improve your domain authority in this regard.

• Try working on a Facebook business page and enhance your follower base.

• Ensure strong and consistent social media performance to reduce bounce rate.

• Have a social media button and make it great for readers to easily share the content.

• Check your content looks best while using the buttons for social sharing.

Conclusion

Marketers and various companies have been focusing on efforts to concentrate on improving Domain authority using various methods. Techniques like pdf submission and various other submission strategies have also contributed to the link building and improvement of Domain Authority. Remember you don’t have to be too biased towards the Domain Authority score. This is a mere number that shows the strength of your domain when compared with the other domains in the Moz database.

When you have a low DA score, it is not an implication of the weak performance of your website on Google. High Domain Authority metrics ensure you are on the right path, but always view things on a larger scale, ie. authority websites can earn solid Google or other search rankings.