9 Easy Steps To Increase Your Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking metric developed by Moz, a Seattle-based software service (SaaS) company, that predicts how well a site will rank online. DA is measured on a scale of 1 to 100 — the closer you are to 100, the better your odds of ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs) and earning more clicks.
What’s your site’s DA?
Moz has a free tool called Link Explorer that you can use to check your site’s DA.
Head over to https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home. You’ll see a page with a search bar in the middle:
Enter your site URL into the search bar and hit “Analyze.” You’ll see a results page with your Domain Authority (DA) listed:
We’d say most DAs hover around the 30-50 mark, roughly speaking. However, if your Domain Authority is lower than that, don’t be discouraged.
With this nine-step plan, you will most definitely improve your Domain Authority score.
9 Steps to Increase Domain Authority (DA)
1. Age your domain name.
They say that wisdom comes with age — and this is especially true when it comes to your domain name. Older domain names are seen as more legitimate and have a much higher DA score than younger domain names. It means that every time you change your domain, it’s like knocking down the credibility you’ve built up over the years and starting from scratch. That’s why it’s important to pick an easy-to-remember domain name that’s relevant to your niche and keep it for a very long time.
2. Optimize your On-Page.
The next step in improving your DA is to optimize all your on-page code, content, site structure, meta tags, and other on-page elements (such as H1, title tags, image alt tag and site architecture) to be search engine friendly.
3. Create high-quality content.
To attract high-quality links from multiple domains in your niche, you absolutely have to create awesome content that appeals to your target audience. Doing so will definitely improve your Domain Authority score (and give you a ton of additional SEO benefits).
4. Improve your internal linking structure.
You must not be so overly concerned with earning external links that you lose sight of linking internally. Internal links help nudge visitors to what they are trying to find on your website, thus enriching their user experience and taking your Domain Authority score up.
5.Clean up your link profile.
If you want a great Domain Authority score, you’re going to have to find a way to keep your link profile clean. And to do that, you need to remove the bad links from your profile. This process entails using a tool like Moz Explorer, Ahrefs Backlink Checker or SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool to figure out any inappropriate or unwanted links.
Once you have performed your link audit, you can contact the website owners and ask them to either delete the link or add the “nofollow tag” to devalue the link. If this doesn’t work, you can use the Google Disavow tool to remove links from your profile.
6.Create your authority in your niche.
Becoming an authoritative figure in your niche requires you to position yourself as an expert on a particular matter by gaining the confidence of readers and providing expert advice to the community. This can only be accomplished by producing interesting and insightful content (perhaps you can make guest blogs on forums that are related to your industry) and engaging your target audience on social media in a meaningful way.
By reinforcing your public image as an expert, you will be able to enhance your brand image. This will not only help drive a ton of traffic to your site, but will also increase the number of external links you receive from other high-quality domains in your niche. This, of course, translates into a higher DA score.
7.Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Mobile isn’t just the way of the future. It’s the way of the now. According to research, mobile users exceeded desktops in 2014. That happened six years ago!
What this means is that if your website hasn’t been optimized for mobile use yet, not only will it hurt your search rankings (Google favors mobile-friendly sites), but you’ll also lose out on a big chunk of visitors.
In order to get started, you can take advantage of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test for your domain. Google will give you a nice report of how mobile-friendly your site is and what you can do to improve it.
8.Improve your page speed
If you don’t have a website that loads fast, people will bounce faster than you can say “Don’t Go!” After all, most users have very little tolerance, and if the website takes lengthy to load, their patience will run out, and they will abandon the website.
To diagnose what is causing your website to run slower than it should, you can run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Not only will Google’s PageSpeed Insights analyze the speed of your site, it will identify some ways for you to make your site faster and improve your search engine rankings.
9.Increase your social signals.
Although Google has officially stated that social signals are not part of its ranking algorithm, there is a clear correlation between websites that rank high on Google search results and their social signals. What we mean to say is that websites that are popular in Google are more likely to have many likes, shares, and tweets.
Seeing as social signals are a major ranking factor, you will need to share your content on your different social media accounts in order to get those signals. Otherwise, the content, no matter how good, would only sit on your site by itself.
Final Notes
The domain authority is important for a couple reasons. On the one side, it allows you to analyze how well your website does in the search space, and on the other, it allows you to compare the performance of your website with that of competing websites and see where you stand.
At Click4Corp, our team of online experts can help your site climb up the Domain Authority ladder and establish itself as an Internet force to be reckoned with. Interested in learning more about our SEO services in Dallas, TX? Contact us today!