Domain authority is a metric that we all use in our everyday lives as SEO’s. This number indicates the level of authority a website has. So it goes both ways. You want your site to have high levels of this at the same time, you want to go and land a link on websites that have a high domain authority score.
This metric was developed by Moz years ago. This idea of ranking domains all based on their authority was derived from PageRank which came from Larry Page himself, one of Google’s founders.
The domain authority of a website is score between zero to 100. The higher the score is, the better. High DA scores, as a matter of fact, are preferred by more people since it’s technically a more secure and of high quality. Because of this, websites with high DA get more traffic.
This leads us to the question, how do we make it higher? Here are some of the ways that you can do that.
Improving Your Offsite
How easily your DA will grow solely depends on how clean your link profile is. Make sure that you don’t have links that are just there for the sake of having links. The idea here is that you should have a “strong link profile”. Which means that you should have incoming links from other sites that’s already got high DA, links that are relevant and actually related to you and your niche, low to zero bad or low quality links (as much as possible, these should be lessened) and lastly, unique links from unique domains.
So, if you get to check your backlinks and you think that you actually have links that you need to take out to “clean” it up a bit, don’t hesitate to do so. One clue here is that you can pick the ones that look suspicious. Like the links you didn’t build. But, don’t straight up take out them immediately. You still need to check them one by one and see if these are actual links built by people that have good intentions.
Once you’ve collected all those bad links, you can now place them on a notepad file and pass them to Google’s Disavow Tool and wait for 4 weeks.
While that’s cooking, do your best to replace those links with high quality ones and actually do it the correct and clean way. Building relationships online with other website owners takes a lot of work, time and effort. But when done correctly, can give you so much benefits in the future.
Another way for you to gain new links is that to create content on your website that people would automatically want to re-share or link on. Content like that needs to be very insightful and informative. One of the benefits of this is that you get to build links that are built naturally. Also you don’t have to do anything after.
Improving Your Onsite
If you want to take it really seriously, you should never forget the onsite aspect of everything. Other than the onsite content mentioned above, there are still other aspects that can and should be improved on the website itself.
Titles and meta descriptions should be properly written. When writing them, make sure that they’re actually doing their job. Descriptions should describe the page they’re in and titles should declare what the page is about. Easy peasy.
Header tags should also be properly used within the contents of the site. URL structure should be correct and not be made out of symbols and gibberish that only aliens would be able to understand and remember.
All your images and media elements should also be optimized. Do they have all the proper tags and description?
The inclusion of keywords within the contents of the site is also important, but can easily be misinterpreted as stuffing all those keywords on every paragraph available.
Just don’t.
Make sure that you are using the keywords correctly and properly. They should be naturally placed in the sentences and paragraphs. This then leads us to the internal links. Every time there is a part of the content that is implied that there is a possible service or product somewhere else on the site, a link going to that page can be placed. This way the flow of traffic is easy and visitors can easily navigate themselves across your website.
Technical SEO
Next is the other details of your onsite. All these low level tasks that you don’t have to do again are all still very important. Yes, you only have to apply them once and that’s it. But remember that if it’s not done correctly, that will be a whole world of problem too.
Remember to check if your website is already registered in Google Search Console and/or Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap.xml on these tools. That goes the same for your robots.txt as well.
On other sources out there on the web, you will see things like “consider migrating your website to HTTPS”, but for us, it is absolutely important that you do it. There’s no considering part here. You HAVE to do it. Making sure that your website is a secure place is a very important thing to remember when you’re actively trying to increase your domain authority score.
Add in that schema mark up. Make sure the search engine understands the details of your site clearly.
Make Sure That Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
This part is a no brainer at this point. Everyone out there has a mobile phone now. Even little kids that are still learning how to talk are holding tablets to watch their favorite kiddie cartoons Information is now going to the mobile devices. If your content is easily delivered to these devices, the better chances you have.
Improving Your Page Speed
A website that loads as quick as the spin of the planet’s axis is a very bad website. If your page loading speed is really slow, all that great quality content and quality links will not matter. One easy way to improve it is run it on Google’s page load speed test tool online. It’s free and very handy since it also offers you ways on how you can improve the load speed.
Take note however that improving your site speed will not directly affect your ranking or the domain authority itself. But this translates directly on how quick people will get to your site and see your content. The user experience will affect this part of the performance more.
Increasing Your Social Signals
Yes. It has been stated many times that there is no direct correlation with social media and how you perform online, but, all the high ranking search results there have an exceptional amount of social media following. So again, never believe everything you read online. Do tests and find things out for yourself.
Make sure that you get to focus and have a good reputation on social media. Develop your Facebook business page. Engage with your audience, be active there. You can also make sure that all your content on your website has social media buttons so people can share them easily.
Patience
Lastly, you need to be really patient with these things. Increasing your domain authority score is a really arduous process. I’ve personally experienced going from zero to DA 34 on an old blog from years before. Going from DA 20 to 30 is easy. But when you get past that, it gets harder and harder to go up. That’s why being patient when doing these things is very important. It takes years to increase domain authority. The good news here is that you can ensure that you get to build the quality of your website.
