Best Seven 7 Practical Steps to Increase Your Website’s Domain Authority
7 Useful Steps to Add a Website Management Domain
Domain Authority (DA) is a number (metric) that indicates the authority of your website. The higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPS) and get more traffic.
Domain Authority metrics were developed by Moz, but other companies have developed similar metrics that measure domains based on specific factors and give them a rating of 0 to 100.
The idea of ranking domains according to their authority came from the PageRank presented by Larry Page (one of Google’s founders) and is used to this day as a way to measure the value of web pages and websites.
In this article we will discuss the following topics:
• What is domain authority?
• How is domain authority calculated?
• VS Page domain authority?
• How to increase domain power
What is the domain authority (DA) of a website?
The DA’s website is a score of 0 to 100 (if it gets better,) that tries to guess how the website will rank well in search engines.
It is not the same as the Google Rate (PageRank) rating that can affect your rankings.
Moz (and other companies with similar systems) are trying to mimic Google’s algorithm by paying attention to all known factors that may affect the standards, and provide points for domains that can only be used for comparative purposes.
In other words, the DA relies on the information Moz has about your website that is sometimes as inaccurate as Google knows about your website.
It is common for a domain to have a lower Domain Authority but ranked high on Google.
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Some things to know about the DA:
• The DA does not consider Google fines. A domain under penalty of Google naturally loses its ranks but if this is not known by Moz. Therefore, the domain authority will still rise while the domain is under penalty.
• The Google level algorithm estimates hundreds of items (no one knows the number but some predictions indicate that there are more than 200) while the Domain Authority estimates only 40 items.
• It is not easy to change your DA points. It is not something you can do on your website today and see an increase in domain authority immediately.
• The DA relies on the logarithmic scale. This means that it is easy to improve your DA points from 20 to 30 but it is very difficult from 70 to 80. The higher the scale, the harder it becomes.
• The DA is constantly changing so it is not a metaphor you can use to test your SEO performance over time but rather a website metaphor you can use for domain comparison purposes.
How is domain authority calculated?
According to Moz, they calculated the Domain Authority based on signals (40 in total) including:
• Number of incoming links pointing to your website.
• Quality and consistency of incoming links
• The quality of your website content
• Social signals (popularity of your domain and content on social media networks)
• SEO performance for your website in general
How can you get the DA for my website?
To get your domain administrator points, go to the open site tester, type in your domain and see the result.
Moz Open Site Explorer
What is page authority?
Page Authority (PA) is similar to the DA but instead of looking at broad domain metrics, it uses page-specific signals.
The score provided is a prediction of the page’s strengths and scope for search engines.
A website with many pages of high authority, will have high DA results (domain authority).
7 Practical Steps on How to Improve Your Domain Authority
Now that it’s clear what domain authority is and how it is calculated, let’s see how you can improve your domain authority.
Here are 7 steps you must take to increase your Domain Authority Score.
Step 1: Work on your off-page SEO
Step 2: Use of SEO on the page
Step 3: Work on Your Professional SEO
Step 4: Make sure your Website is Soft Friendly
Step 5: Improve Your Page Speed
Step 6: Develop Your Community Signs
Step 7: Be patient
Step 1: Work on your off-page SEO
Your link profile is the most important metric. Websites with a strong, clean profile will have higher DA results than websites that do not have such good links.
What is a strong link profile?
The website is said to have a strong link where:
• Contains incoming links from the most influential websites
• Incoming links come from related websites
• No bad links (low quality links)
• Contains links from many different domains
How can you improve your profile profile?
The process of improving your link profile is known as Off-Page SEO and is related to the strategies you can use to find good links that will ultimately improve your rankings.
To strengthen your link profile, and among other things, improve your Domain authority you need:
Remove bad links from your profile
Remove bad links. This process involves using a tool like Moz Explorer or Semrush to find toxic links.
You can contact the website owners and ask them to remove the link or add a “nofollow” tag to lower the link.
If this doesn’t work, you can use the Google disavow tool to remove links from your profile.
Strengthen your link profile
Find great links from other related websites. This is a tricky part and one of the most challenging parts of SEO.
Link building is a major topic in itself and from experience, it is something beginners who find it difficult to understand and practice.
If you are just starting out in SEO, I strongly recommend that you read Lesson 5 of the Complete SEO Course, which explains step by step how to get closer to link building.
To give you an overview of the process, there are 2 great ways to get good links.
# 1 – Natural Link Structure
Having good content on your website that will attract links from other websites.
This is known as ‘natural link building’ and the idea that someone finds your website, reads your articles, likes it and links it from one of their articles.
For this to work, it is necessary that the relevant content link be published on your website.
In other words, content that is understandable, usable and easy to read so that other webmasters are willing to comment on it in their articles.
By doing this, this process is effective and very profitable but you need patience because it will take time to get enough readings for some of the readers to share your content on their blogs.
A good example of how to create a natural link is the blog you are currently reading.
My articles are linked ‘naturally’ from websites like the web, entrepreneur, marketingland, quicksprout and a group of other leading websites in the industry.
# 2 – Access to Blogger
The second way to find good links is to reach out to other webmasters and let them know you exist.
By doing so, you increase your chances of linking to your website within their articles.
Check out my post, on how to drive traffic to your blog, including email templates that you can use to access your email and other strategies to track and retrieve those valuable backlinks.
Step 2: Use of SEO on the page
The next step is to improve your domain authority’s performance in your SEO page.
On-Page SEO is related to optimizing your page and content.
My complete SEO and SEO course for Blogger articles explains in detail how to improve your SEO on the page, but the most important things are:
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Custom articles and descriptions
• Proper use of titles (H1 and H2) for your content
• URL structure and permalinks organized by SEO.
• SEO Enhances your photos, videos, and other media content
You use natural keywords in your content (no keywords focus)
• Adding internal links to your content (this is a very powerful SEO process)
• Formatting your content is a way for you to have more opportunities to be included in the Google Caption level.
We also need to point out that content quality is the biggest factor in both on-page and off-site SEO.
As Google points out to one of its SEO directors, it is important to keep your content up to date.
Guidelines for new content – Google
Step 3: Work on Your Professional SEO
Professional SEO is related to low-level SEO tasks and usually, once you get your professional SEO right from the start, you don’t have to deal with it anymore.
On the other hand, if the SEO technical aspect of your website is wrong, then this can have a huge impact on your Domain Authority and your rankings.
Critical SEO settings you need to check to include:
• Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools
• Create and upgrade your xml site map and send it to Google
• Check your robots.txt settings and use Fetch like Google to make sure Google and other search engine spiders can crawl your website without any problems.
• Consider moving your website to https
• Enter schema data to help search engines understand the content of your content
• Make sure you have a well-defined bread menu on all pages
• Make good use of hreflang (in case you have a multilingual website)
Step 4: Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Step 4: Make sure your Website is Soft Friendly
Having a mobile phone compatible website is no longer a voluntary or good thing to have but a mandatory one.
Here are a few reasons:
• Mobile search is now more than desktop (about 60%).
• Many users start their mobile searches and continue to Desktop
• Mobile friendship is standard (display on Google mobile results)
• Google is working on a portable first index and websites that are not compatible with mobile phones will not be included
• Not having a concrete version of your website (or responsive website), has a negative impact on your entire Domain Authority Score.
If your website isn’t compatible with mobile at the moment, a good way to start is to go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and do your domain test.
Google will give you a good report with recommendations to make your website more mobile.
Google Mobile Friendship Test
Step 5: Improve Your Page Speed
One of the most popular ‘signals’ of Google’s algorithm is page speed. The website loads much faster, with more benefits than slow-moving websites.
Improving your page speed will not only improve your rankings and domain authority but will also improve user experience and translate into more sales, leads and subscriptions.
Importance of SEO Page Speed
It is not always easy to deal with page speed problems. There are a lot of technical issues involved and if you are not an engineer or person with technical knowledge, it can be very difficult.
However, if you can’t afford a developer to increase the download speed of your website, you can check the following:
• Remove unnecessary plugins
Upgrade WordPress (and plugins) to their latest versions
• Contact your hosting provider and ask them to provide you with a report on your server performance. If necessary, upgrade to a more powerful server.
Use a cache plugin (like w3total cache)
• Adjust image file size
• Use a streaming service (like YouTube) to find videos
• Use a CDN (content delivery network) in case you have large CSS files and multiple images
Step 6: Develop Your Community Signs
Although Google officially states that social symbols are not part of the Google Ranking algorithm, there is a clear line between the top pages on Google and the social symbols.
Popular pages on Google like more likes, shares, and tweets.
In order to extend your domain authority you need to:
• Work on your Facebook business page and try to increase your followers
• Ensuring you have active social connections to other social networks so that the content you share is available (likes, tweets, 1s, etc.)
• Ensuring that you have a social media button on your pages to make it easier for readers to share your content
• Checking that your content looks good when shared using social sharing buttons
Step 7: Be patient
As mentioned in the introduction to this post, expanding your domain authority is not something that can be done overnight.
It will take time for Moz crawlers to read and test your website after making the above changes, so you need patience.
Working efficiently to improve your google standards will also have a positive effect on your domain points.
The conclusion
To sum it up, don’t worry too much about your domain authority rating. It’s just a number that shows how strong your domain is, compared to other domains available on the Moz website.
Getting low DA points does not mean that your website will not work properly on Google.
Getting a good DA score means you are on the right track, but it does not guarantee that you will get better levels or traffic, it is just a prediction.
Always try to think of the big picture, which is to build a website over time that will reach solid levels on Google and other search engines.
