How to Increase Your Website’s Domain Authority in 6 Easy Steps
Domain Authority (DA) is a number (metric) that represents the authority of your website and its SEO. Your chances of appearing higher in search engine result pages (SERPS) and attracting more organic visitors increase with your domain authority.
Moz introduced the Domain Authority measure, but other businesses have produced comparable metrics that evaluate domains based on a number of criteria and assign them a value from 0 to 100.
In order to gauge the significance of webpages and websites, Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, proposed the notion of ranking domains according to their authority, which came from PageRank.
What is domain authority?
A website’s domain authority (DA), which ranges from 0 to 100 (the greater the better), attempts to forecast how well a website will perform in search engine results.
It differs from the PageRank ranking score used by Google, which does have an impact on ranks.
By considering every known aspect that could have an impact on rankings and assigning a score to domains that can only be used for comparison, Moz (and other da checker services) attempt to imitate the Google ranking algorithm.
In other words, the DA is determined by the information Moz has about your website, which is occasionally less accurate than the information Google has.
A domain can score highly on Google while having a low Domain Authority.
Things you should know about domain authority:
- Google penalties are not taken into consideration by DA. Naturally, a domain that receives a Google penalty falls in the ranks, although Moz may not be aware of this. Therefore, even if the domain is being penalised, its domain authority will still remain high.
- Only 40 parameters are taken into account by Domain Authority, compared to hundreds included by Google’s ranking algorithm (the precise number is unknown, however some estimates put that number at over 200).
- Your DA score cannot be changed easily. You can’t immediately use it on your website and observe a boost in domain authority.
- A logarithmic scale is used to calculate DA. This indicates that increasing your DA score from 20 to 30 is simpler than increasing it from 70 to 80. As you move up the scale, the difficulty increases.
- DA is more of a website statistic to be used for domain comparisons than it is a metric to utilise to assess your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success over time because of how rapidly it changes.
How is domain authority calculated?
According to Moz, they use a total of 40 parameters to determine Domain Authority, including the following:
- The quantity of inbound links to your website
- The integrity and relevance of inbound links
- The quality of the content on your website
- Social signals (How often your content is shared across social media platforms)
- Overall SEO performance of your website
How do I find the domain authority of a website?
Visit the Moz domain analysis SEO tool, enter your domain name, and then review the results to get your domain authority score.
What is page authority?
Similar to DA, Page Authority (PA) employs signals that are local to a certain page rather than using measures that are domain-wide.
The calculated score is a forecast of a page’s strength and potential search engine ranking.
The DA (domain authority) score of a website will be greater if it has more high authority pages.
Let’s look at ways to raise your domain authority now that its definition and calculation are apparent.
1. Practice off-page SEO
The most crucial measure is your link profile. The DA score of websites with strong, clean link profiles will be greater than those with weak link profiles.
What exactly is a strong link profile?
When a website has a strong link profile when:
- It has backlinks from websites with high authority
- Relevant websites provide inbound links
- There are no bad links (low-quality backlinks)
- It has links from several unique websites
How can I improve my link profile?
Off-Page SEO is the process of enhancing your link profile and it relates to methods you may employ to obtain high-quality links that will eventually boost your rankings.
In order to strengthen your link profile and increase your domain authority, you must:
Disavow bad links
Remove any bad links. In order to identify the harmful links, use a programme like Moz Explorer or Semrush.
The website owners can then be contacted and asked to either take the link down or add the “nofollow tag” to disavow the link.
If that doesn’t work, you may delete the links from your profile using Google’s disavow tool.
Strengthen your link profile
Obtain quality backlinks from relevant websites. One of the trickiest and most difficult aspects of SEO is this.
Link building is a vast subject in and of itself, and from experience, newcomers find it challenging to comprehend and implement.
There are 2 main approaches to obtain quality connections, to give you an outline of the procedure.
Building links organically
You should have excellent content that will draw links from other websites to your website.
The idea behind this process, which is referred to as “natural link building,” is that someone will find your website, read your articles, enjoy them, and link to it from one of their own.
You must post link-worthy material on your website for this to be effective.
For other webmasters to be eager to cite it in their articles, material must be smart, practical and easy to read.
This method actually works and is quite helpful, but you must have patience since it will take some time to build up a large enough following that some people will post your information on their blogs.
Reaching out to bloggers
Reaching out to other webmasters and letting them know that you exist is the second approach to obtain quality links.
By doing this, you raise the possibility that one of their articles may connect to your website.
You can check out our guest posting and link exchange services on AdminIntel if you’re looking to build your link profile.
2. Optimize on-page SEO
To increase your domain authority, focus on your on-page SEO as a next step.
The goal of on-page SEO is to improve the content and your website design.
The most key aspects are:
- Title and description optimization
- Use headings (H1 and H2) correctly in your content
- SEO-friendly permalinks and URL structure
- Your videos, images, and other media items should be SEO-optimized
- Natural keyword placement in your article (avoid keyword stuffing)
- Internal linking inside your content is a great SEO technique
- Formatting your content to increase the likelihood that it will appear in Google’s featured snippets
The importance of content quality as a ranking criteria for both on-page and off-page SEO must be emphasised once more.
Maintaining current and new content is crucial, as Google said in one of its SEO guidelines.
3. Make use of Technical SEO
Technical SEO is connected to low-level SEO activities, and if you get it right the first time, you often don’t have to worry about it again.
On the other hand, your website’s technical SEO aspects might significantly affect your Domain Authority and ranks if they are incorrect.
The essential SEO parameters you should verify include:
- Register your website with Bing Webmaster tools and Google Search Console.
- Make your XML sitemap, optimise it, and submit it to search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)
- To make sure that search engine spiders can explore your website without issues, check your robots.txt file and test it with Google’s robots.txt Tester
- Think about switching your website over to HTTPS
- To make it easier for search engines to grasp the context of your content, include structured data (schema) metadata.
- Make sure that every page has a breadcrumb navigation that is well defined
- Use hreflang appropriately (for multilingual websites)
4. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly
A mobile-friendly website is now required.
Here are some of the reasons:
- Nowadays, mobile searches outnumber desktop searches by roughly 60%
- The majority of people begin their searches on mobile before moving to desktop
- A ranking criteria (for appearing in Google’s mobile results) is mobile friendliness
- Websites that are not mobile-friendly will not be included in Google’s mobile-first index, which is currently in development
- Your total Domain Authority Score will suffer if your website doesn’t have a mobile-friendly or responsive version
The easiest place to start if your website isn’t mobile-friendly yet is to run a test for your domain with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Google will provide you with a report that includes suggestions for optimising your website for mobile devices.
5. Boost your page speed
Page speed is one of the well-known “signals” of the Google ranking algorithm. Faster-loading websites provide an extra benefit over slower ones.
The user experience will be improved by increasing page speed, which will increase leads, signups and sales in addition to ranking and domain authority.
Approaching the problem of page speed is not always simple. There are many technical aspects involved, and it can be quite challenging if you are inexperienced or not a developer.
However, you may examine the following if you cannot afford to pay a developer to speed up the loading of your website:
- Remove any extra plugins
- Update WordPress or XenForo to the most recent versions, as well as any add-ons or plugins
- Get in touch with your hosting company and request a performance report for your server. Move to a more capable server if necessary
- Implement a caching plugin (such as litespeed cache or wp-rocket)
- Reduce the size of image files
- For videos, use a streaming provider like YouTube
- Use a CDN (content delivery network) if your CSS files are large and you have a lot of images
6. Gain more Social Signals
There is a definite association between pages that rank highly on Google and social signals, even though Google has repeatedly declared that social signals are not part of the Google Ranking algorithm.
Popular Google pages typically receive a lot of shares, tweets and likes.
You must do the following to raise your domain authority:
- To improve your Facebook company profile and strive to gain more followers
- To help the content you publish on social media gain some momentum, make sure you are active on at least some of the platforms (share tweets on Twitter, give out likes, etc.)
- To make it simple for visitors to share your content on social media, make sure your pages feature a social networking button
- To make sure your content displays properly when shared via social sharing buttons
The bottom line
Increasing your domain authority is a process that takes time, as was indicated in the article’s opening.
You need to be patient since it will take some time for Moz crawlers to scan and analyse your website after you make any of the adjustments listed above.
Your domain authority score will benefit from your consistent efforts to improve your Google rankings.
Be careful not to become overly fixated on your domain authority score. It’s just a figure that compares your domain’s strength to that of other domains in the Moz database.
A low DA score does not guarantee poor Google performance for your website.
A high DA score indicates that you are on the right track, but it is only a prediction and does not ensure that you will receive higher ranks or more visitors.
Always strive to keep the larger picture in mind while developing a website so that it may over time obtain dependable ranks in Google and other search engines.
Glad to see more writing and coverage of DA. Its sad that many SEO’s instnatly dismiss it. If Google still published PageRank (or tbPR) – then sure, DA wouldnt be as useful but in its absence, its the best gauge we have.
Great article. I already fallow few of your steps, listen in here.
Thank you.