There are literally hundreds of different factors Google uses to determine the search engine ranking of a website. One particular metric that has taken on great importance over the years is the domain authority of a website.
Domain authority is a metric that was developed by a company called Moz. The higher your domain authority is, the more likely you are to earn a higher search engine ranking and thus, receive more traffic. Your domain authority is also a great way to measure your SEO efforts along with comparing the strength of your website to that of your competitors.
Domain Authority versus Page Authority
Before we discuss how you can increase your domain authority, it’s important to explain the difference between that and page authority. Page authority is a similar metric, but instead of measuring the strength of an entire domain or subdomain, it only measures the ranking strength of a single page.
How Does Moz Calculate Domain Authority
Domain authority is scored on a scale between 1 and 100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being the best. The algorithm being used was designed by Moz and as you might expect, is not completely available for anyone to see. Its logarithmic scale means that it will be much easier to improve your score if your domain authority is at a 20 or a 30 than if it was at 70 or 80. Domain authority between 40 and 50 is considered average, between 50 and 60 is considered good and over 60 is considered excellent. Although Moz uses over 40 different factors when determining page authority, some of them include: Linking Root Domains, MozRank, MozTrust, Social Signals, and Quality Content.
How To Increase Your Domain Authority
Now that you have some understanding as to why domain authority is important and how it’s calculated, you’re probably wondering how you can start increasing the authority of your domain. Listed below 4 different steps you can take to begin increasing it today!
Optimize Your On-Page Content – Search engine optimization matters for both Google rankings and your domain authority. That means you should make sure to optimize all on-page code, including your title tags, image alt tags, and the content itself. Don’t forget to include variations of your main keywords, keep your permalinks short and relevant, and create a sidebar widget for new posts so they can be quickly discovered.
Create Linkable Content – In order to earn high-quality links from several other domains, it’s important to create high-quality content that is published regularly. Remember, both MozRank and MozTrust use high-quality links as an important factor in their numbers. The better your content is, the more likely it is to be linked from an authoritative site.
Remove Bad And Toxic Links – Every once in a while, you should go through your link profile and search for any backlinks that are bad or toxic. This will allow you to remove links from bad sources that could end up hurting your domain authority rather than improving it. You should also remove any links posted throughout your website that lead to bad sites or are broken as these will have a negative impact as well. This step might sound like a hassle, but there are several websites out there which can show you incoming links free of charge!
Make Sure That Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly – A growing number of online users access the web through mobile devices. If your website hasn’t been optimized for mobile use yet, then you are way behind. Not only will that hurt your mobile search engine rankings, but you’ll lose out on lots of visitors who will simply leave your site once they realize that it’s not being properly displayed on their smartphone or tablet. To check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can visit the Mobile-Friendly Test by Google Developers page. It will analyze your page and let you know how mobile-friendly that page is.
