How To Increase Domain Authority

Domain Authority or DA is a useful score that website owners and SEO specialists refer to so that they can assess how well one or more pages on a website is ranking in search engines such as Google. DA is measured on a scale from 1 to 100. If you want to know more about DA and how to improve your score, this post holds the answers!

Understanding Domain Authority

Created by Moz, the concept of domain authority is somewhat similar to Google’s PageRank (PR) score (from 1 to 10) – though not exactly working like the PR. Google no longer allows us to see the PR scores anymore so DA has become a proxy for search marketers. DA scores are used to show how credible a website is among other websites. For example, website X links to website Y. That link then increases the DA of website Y and increases the likelihood that the pages on that domain will rank better. Basically, it kind of sounds like a vote of confidence.

It’s true that the number of linking websites affects a page’s DA score but you must remember that quality is king here, not quantity. In any case, links from websites with high DA scores are able to pass much more authority to sites they link to. If you are planning to increase domain authority, keep in mind that this is not the only search ranking factor that you should focus on. Note that sites with higher authority can be outranked by sites with lower authority. Remember, what your web pages need is relevance when it comes to the searches.

How to Know the Domain Authority of any Website

Do you know how to find out the DA of your website? The easiest way is to use the Open Site Explorer. Don’t worry, it’s free and all you need to do is to enter a domain into the search field. You will receive information comprising of the domain authority score itself and a portion of the backlink profile. If you want to see all the data, you will have to opt for the paid version of Open Site Explorer.

While the report is simple, it already contains a lot of good information. You should note that the report is specific to that one domain name. To understand the competitiveness of a particular phrase, you have to:

• Search for the phrase
• Enter the domain name of the high ranking page

Strategies to Improve Domain Authority

When it comes to implementing strategies to improve domain authority, pick the ones that offer long-term benefits. Here are some of the important ones you can drill into your memory first:

• Remove toxic links

Make it a habit to peruse your link profile to weed out spam links. Once you locate these toxic links, eliminate them. By cleaning up your link profile on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, you can gain a huge competitive advantage and avoid penalties set by Google.

• Write content that makes others want to link to you

Train yourself or engage the pros to create a strong stream of linkable content. You can consider creating articles and infographics that contain evergreen content on a daily basis as well. While it may seem like a lot of content to handle, remember content does drive the success of many businesses online.

• Put in effort in stellar internal linking

A dense and powerful site network requires a strong network of high quality internal backlinks. Properly implemented internal links benefits both the search engines that crawl and index your site and the end users themselves. That’s why it brings us back to the previous point of having as much as content as possible – you will have more content to link to!

• Make sure you have a strong overall SEO strategy in place

From mapping out a URL structure to optimizing your robots.txt and more, it is pertinent that you have an effective SEO strategy in place. By improving your overall SEO, your DA is automatically improved. So pay attention to details such as alt tags, keywords, word count, header tags, meta tags, URL structure, breadcrumbs, navigability, and more. If you do not have adequate knowledge about SEO, why not hire a team of NJ SEO experts to help you? The results will be more than worth it!