11 Tactics To Increase Your Domain Authority Today
Are working hard to find out the secret to getting ranked at the top of SERPs or Google search results.
The good news is – you have come to the right place.
Today, I will be sharing with you the most important factors that you must understand to learn SEO – Domain Authority.
When you have high DA score, you will be likely to increase the odds of your website ranking higher in search engines.
High domain authority sites do not happen overnight. You need a great strategy and patience. Trust me; I have been there.
Before we dive into how to improve domain authority, let’s firstly understand what exactly is domain authority.
This concept is at the core of any solid SEO strategy.
What Is Domain Authority (DA)?
Domain authority was developed by MOZ based on a logarithmic score between 0 to 100.
Google page rank rode off into the sunset in 2010, and MOZ domain authority checker has been left as the standard metric.
A brand new website usually starts with a DA score of 0 or 1. As for well-established sites like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, their DA scores are close to 100.
The score also helps to predict how well your website will rank in the SERPs. To keep it simple, you can think of it this way: The higher your DA score is, the higher the rank and traffic that you will get.
Primarily, the number of backlinks from high authority sites will have a significant impact on your DA score.
If you follow proper white hat organic SEO, DA will come.
One thing you should know is that it is not easy to obtain a high DA score.
To avoid a low score, you have to keep your website updated with quality content.
If it is low quality, Google will take it that your site is inactive and you may see a decline in rankings.
Here are some of the factors that affect your domain authority:
- Trust
- Social signals, Social Shares
- Linking root domains
- Total backlink profile quality
- User experience
- Website Structure
- Technical SEO including on page SEO
- Site loading time
- Domain age
- Many more ranking factors go into SEO authority with Google
Now that you know the fundamental ranking factors let’s get to the critical part of this blog post.
How to Check Domain Authority
If you would like to check your website’s DA score, use Moz Open Site Explorer tool. You can also check page authority at the same time.
Once you check domain authority, you have a starting point to compare with months down the road.
Here is an example of checking the domain authority score for seoexpertbrad.com.
So how to increase domain authority?
Use Link Earning To Boost Trust
Many of you are probably thinking, “Why not link building?”
I would say that link building is an outdated technique that is not preferred by many marketers already.
Instead of using link building, I use a much more effective and safer method – Natural link earning.
The best way to earn your links?
Forget old school link building: content marketing, my friend.
After many years in the SEO industry, I found that content marketing is the solution to many problems, including boosting your domain authority.
When you write unique and quality content, people will find your article helpful and link you on their website. With that, you do not even need to go around commenting and ask for people to visit your site. Instead, it goes the other way round where people will link to you automatically.
Focus On Internal Linking
Internal linking is as important as backlinks.
I have mentioned earlier that one of the factors affecting your domain authority is backlinks. So if you are ignoring this factor, you are making a big mistake.
Whenever you write a new post, don’t forget to link it to your old blog posts. For example, if you are writing a blog post about “How To Do SEO For Beginners,” you can then link to your other blog posts like “SEO Copywriting For Newbies.”
Not only it is helping your readers who are beginners to get more information from your website, but it also helps search engines to crawl and index your entire site.
Internal linking can also contribute to reducing the bounce rate because readers will stay on your website for a very long time when they found useful information.
Implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Since we are all SEO practitioners, I believe this is something that we are familiar with. There’s probably no need even to mention this. However, if you are new to SEO, you have to take note.
Always optimize your website for search engines from now on because it helps with your DA score. Make sure to do keyword research before you start writing. I would recommend using Keyword Planner for this because you can quickly identify the potential keywords that you can rank for.
However, remember, use your keywords sparingly because too many keywords can lead to keyword spamming.
To avoid that from happening, use LSI keywords, which are the keywords related to your main keywords.
You can get more of LSI keywords from these tools. With this, you do not have to worry about getting penalized by Google.
Don’t forget to also optimize your images by adding ALT text with your keywords. This is to help Google bots to read what your image is about.
Publish Quality Blog Posts Consistently
I would hate to say this, but I must say – many of you have overlooked this. A key to build domain authority is quality content published on a consistent basis.
Imagine this, if I am posting a blog post today, then I stop publishing and continue posting another blog post two months later. What will you think of my website as a reader? Will you still come back? Well, nope.
Even Google would not like it because it is not helping the readers. Google aims to find the best content that answers the user’s queries. If your website does not serve the purpose, Google would not be ranking your site.
So if you would like to get ranked, you have to keep your target audience in mind and write content that provides users with information and answers.
Write Unique Content Linkable Content
Not only your content has to be unique, but it has to be content that provides value to your readers. What can your readers get from your website, and not other websites?
My favorite daily read for Google and SEO updates is Search Engine Journal.
I have found that high-quality linkable content is the best way to increase domain authority naturally.
You can publish case studies that you have analyzed for months and let readers know about your findings.
This type of content is original, and they would not be able to get it anywhere else because the data comes from your website. Readers love this kind of exclusive content! Here are some tips on writing high-quality content for SEO.
If you do not have many case studies, you can also keep up with SEO Trends in 2019 to find out the current hottest topics. Look at what the readers are following today. Then write a relevant blog post about it.
This will help to prove your authority and how well you keep up with the industry. You may also consider guest blogging, which I will get into later.
Do not forget, writing content is not enough, you need to promote your content. Content is king!
Speed Up Your Website
If your website is taking too much time to load, it will affect your domain authority with the high bounce rate. No one likes a site that takes ages to load. According to Kissmetrics, it is best to keep your website loading time under 2-3 seconds.
Any longer than that, your visitors will leave the site sooner than you thought. I would recommend using cache plugins like W3 Total Cache if you are on a WordPress site. It helps to increase your website performance and improve the user experience. You will love this tool once you started using it.
Just install the caching plugins and activate it, it will then boost your WordPress site speed automatically. You do not even have to do it manually! I also have almost 100 other SEO TOOLS listed in this blog post.
Remove Bad Backlinks To Your Site
This is pretty straightforward. For all the time that we are doing internal and external linking, there are times where we forget to check on the links. Broken links can bring harm to your website, resulting in lower page authority.
There are two ways to remove them. First, you can contact the owner of the website to fix the link. If you did not get any response from them, you could disavow them. You will gain a considerable advantage in domain authority once you cleaned your link profile.
So you should check all your links again and again and make sure to delete those broken or inactive links. Performing an SEO audit now and then will help to keep track of your website SEO.
Do not use black hat techniques such as buying potential toxic links. If Google caught you doing this, all of your efforts for boosting domain authority would be wasted. Stick to quality backlink building techniques.
Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?
I have to highlight this.
Mobilegeddon is very important, especially now that we are in 2017. Google has started taking mobile-friendly websites as a ranking factor. So if your site is not responsive, you had better start optimizing it for mobile before it affects your domain authority.
Based on a study, comScore found that the number of mobile users has already exceeded the number of people who surf the Net through desktop long ago. Imagine how much it has increased over the years. This is a sign that most of your readers are coming from mobile and if they cannot get any content from your site, they will just leave.
It would not take too much time to optimize your website for mobile.
You can even do a mobile-friendly test to see what is the optimization needed. If you have a developer in your team, just let him know, and he will settle it for you.
Guest Posting or Guest Blogging
When it comes to brand’s authority, I’d always recommend doing guest posting. It is one of the best ways to increase your referral traffic. Moreover, you can reach out to the new readers with this method.
Back when link building was a popular method used by many webmasters, they took advantage of guest posting and used it to spam links.
The technique no longer works as well because Google started to take notice. Many great tools are available for outreach or PR.
So you have to choose wisely on which website you would like to write for. When you guest post on a website that has a higher authority than you, you are building your reputation there, and readers will think of you as a thought leader.
Stay Active On Social Media
I believe we all know how important social media is in this century. You can never underestimate the power of social media; every news passes on super fast on social media.
With an estimated number of having 2.95 billion online users by 2020, sharing your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ will help to get your referral traffic. Besides, you can also get connected with your readers and build relationships with people in the same industry.
If you do not know where or how to start, you can start by joining active groups that are related to your niche. Then simply share your blog posts with them.
There are many groups out there that you can join. Even for the online marketing niche alone, I have already joined more than 50 groups on Facebook, Quora, Reddit, and Google+.
You would be surprised with the results once you start to be active on social media! I have made many valuable relationships with my readers and other influencers.
Keep Calm And Be Patient
After analyzing domain authority for almost a year, I realized that we all should be patient when it comes to boosting our web authority. Generally speaking, the older the domain is, the higher the authority.
Yes, domain age plays a key factor.
Many beginners leave their website to die because they do not have the patience. They think that starting a website to earn money is easy, but they are wrong. It requires patience to build your site and be recognized by Google.
Don’t worry if your site is only one or two months old. As you publish more high-quality content, you will see improvement over time.
Allow Time For Your Domain Authority Ranking To Grow
In my opinion, the key to improving domain authority is to have quality backlinks pointing to valuable content. If you are new to this, don’t panic. There’s still plenty of room for improvement. Start by applying these 11 easy ways to increase your domain authority.
I often have readers asking me why are their sites not making any improvements even after they have made the changes. Now that you are already at the end of this blog post, I believe you understand very well on the reason why.
Remember, domain authority does not move overnight. It takes time and patience to improve your DA score. Use a domain authority checker tool now!
Do you have any other factors that you think affect domain authority? Let us know if you found these tips to increase your domain authority helpful.
Maybe you need professional help? SEO Expert Brad is happy to answer your questions.