Boosting Domain Authority
SEO has always felt like a minefield to me. I understand the basic concepts but implementing it into my blog and at work is a whole other kettle of fish.
But SEO and Domain Authority are both pretty important parts of building a blog that people trust and can find organically. As I’ve been taking steps to build my blog this past summer, taking care of SEO and DA are pretty important.
But what is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is the number that indicates the authority of your website. The higher your domain authority is, the grater chance you have of ranking high on search engine results.
The metric for Domain Authority was developed by Moz, but other companies have created similar metrics that rank domains based on a number of factors and give them a rating from 0-100.
However DA s not the same as the ranking score used by Google which can actually influence your rankings.
Moz are trying to simulate the Google ranking algorithm by taking into account all known factors that can possibly affect rankings, and give a score to domains that can be used for comparison purposes only.
Other important things to know:
how-to-fix-domain-authority
DA does not take into account Google penalties. A domain that is under a Google penalty loses its ranking but if this is not necessarily known to Moz. So, the domain authority will still be high while the domain is under a penalty.
Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account hundreds of factors while Domain Authority will still be high while the domain is under a penalty.
It’s not easy to change your DA score. It’s not something you can do on your website and automatically increase the DA.
DA is based on a logarithmic scale. This means that its easier to improve your DA score from 20 to 30 but it’s much harder to go from 70 to 80. As you go higher on the scale, it becomes more difficult.
DA changes frequently so it’s not a metric to use to evaluate your SEO performance over time but rather a website metric to use for domain comparison purposes.
Now that the basics of Domain Authority are covered, let’s work out how we can improve our domain authority.
Work on your off-page SEO
Your link profile is the most important factor of them all. Websites that have a strong, clean profile will have a higher DA score than the ones with a poor link profile.
What is a strong link profile?
A website is said to have a strong link profile if:
It has incoming links from high authority websites
Incoming links are from related websites
It doesn’t have bad links
It has links from a number of unique domains
How to improve your link profile?
The process of improving your link profile is known as off-page SEO and it is related to techniques you can use to acquire good links that will eventually improve your rankings.
To make your link profile stronger, and among other things, improve your Domain Authority you need to:
Remove bad links from your profile- get rid of bad links. This process involves using a tool like Mozzarellas Explorer or SEMrush to find the toxic links.
You can then contact the website owners and ask them to either remove 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 the links from your profile.
Make your link profile stronger:
Gain good links from other related websites. This is the tricky part and one of the most challenging parts of SEO.
Link building is a huge topic on its own and from experience, it is something that beginners find difficult to understand and execute.
To give you an overview of the process, there are 2 major ways to gain good links.
#1 – Natural Link building
To have great content on your website that will attract links from other websites.
This is known as ‘natural link building’ and the theory is that someone finds your website, reads your articles, they like it and link to it from one of their articles.
For this to work, it is necessary to have link-worthy content published on your website.
In other words, content that is insightful, useful and easy to read so that other webmasters will be willing to reference it in their articles.
In practice, this process works and it is very beneficial but you need to be patient because it will take time to gain enough readership so that some of the readers will share your content in their blogs.
A good example of how natural link building works is the blog you are reading now.
My articles have been ‘naturally’ linked from websites like thenextweb, entrepreneur, marketingland, quicksprout and a bunch of other leading industry websites.
#2 – Blogger outreach
The second way to get good links is to reach out to other webmasters and let them know that you exist.
By doing so, you increase your chances of linking to your website within their articles.
On-Page SEO Optimization
The next step in improving your domain authority is to work on your on-page SEO.
On-Page SEO has to do with optimising your page and content.
The most important features of improving on-page SEO are:
Optimized titles and Descriptions
Proper use of Headings (H1 and H2) within your content
URL structure and SEO optimized permalinks.
SEO Optimizing your images, videos, and other media elements
Using keywords naturally in your content (no keyword stuffing)
Adding internal links to your content (this is a very powerful SEO technique)
Formatting your content is such a way so as to have more chances ranking in Google’s featured snippets.
It is necessary to mention again that the quality of the content is the biggest ranking factor of all for both on-page and off-page SEO.
As stated by Google in one of its SEO guides, it is important to keep your content fresh and up to date.
Work on Your Technical SEO
Technical SEO is related to low-level SEO tasks and usually, once you get your technical SEO correct from the beginning, you don’t have to deal with it again.
On the other hand, if the technical SEO aspect of your website is not correct, then this can have a huge impact on your Domain Authority and rankings.
The critical SEO settings you need to check to include:
Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools
Create and optimize your xml sitemap and submit to Google
Check your robots.txt settings and use Fetch as Google to ensure that Google and other search engine spiders can crawl your website without problems.
Consider migrating your website to https
Add structured data (schema) information to help search engines understand the context of your content
Make sure that you have a properly defined breadcrumb menu on all pages
Make proper use of hreflang (in case you have a multilingual website)
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional or nice to have but it’s mandatory.
Here are a few reasons:
Mobile searches are now more than desktop (about 60%).
Most users start their search on mobile and then continue on Desktop
Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor (for showing in Google’s mobile results)
Google is working on a mobile first index and website’s that are not mobile-friendly will simply not be included
Not having a mobile-friendly version of your website (or responsive website), has a negative impact on your overall Domain Authority Score.
If your website is not mobile friendly yet, the best way to start is to go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test for your domain.
Google will give you a nice report with recommendations on how to make your website mobile ready.
Improve Your Page Speed
One of the known ‘signals’ of the Google ranking algorithm is page speed. Website’s that load faster, have an additional advantage over slower websites.
Improving your page speed will not only improve your rankings and domain authority but it will make the user experience better and this translates to more sales, leads, and signups.
It’s not always easy to tackle the page speed issue. There are a lot of technical elements involved and if you are not a developer or someone with technical knowledge, it can be very difficult.
Nevertheless, if you cannot afford to hire a developer to increase the loading 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 give you a report on your server’s performance. If necessary, upgrade to a more powerful server.
Use a caching plugin (such as w3total cache)
Optimize the file size of images
Use a streaming service (like YouTube) for videos
Use a CDN (content delivery network) in case you have big CSS files and many images
Increase Your Social Signals
Although officially Google has many times stated that social signals are not part of the Google Ranking algorithm, there is a clear coloration between pages that rank high on Google and social signals.
Pages that are popular in Google tend to have many likes, shares, and tweets.
For the purpose of increasing your domain authority what you need to do is:
To work on your Facebook business page and try to increase your followers
To make sure that you have an active social media presence in some of the social networks so that the content you share will get some traction (likes, tweets, +1s, etc)
To ensure that you have a social media button on your pages to make it easy for readers to share your content
To check that your content looks good when shared using the social sharing buttons
Be Patient
As mentioned in the introduction of this post, increasing your domain authority is not something that can be done overnight.
It will take time for Moz crawlers to read and evaluate your website after you make any of the above changes, so you need to be patient.
Working systematically on improving your google rankings will also have a positive effect on your domain authority score.
To conclude
You shouldn’t get too obsessed about your domain authority. It’s just a number that shows how strong your domain is, compared to other domains that exist in the Moz database.
A low DA score does not mean that your website will not perform on Google.
Yes, A high DA score means that you are on the right path, but it does not guarantee that you will get better rankings or traffic, it is just a prediction.
Always try to think of the big picture, which is to build a website that over time will achieve solid rankings in Google and other search engines.