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Domain Authority is a very important yet highly overlooked aspect of any website.
Its high value will help you to edge past your competitors by getting high rank for keywords in the search engine result pages.
In today’s article, I will illustrate the steps and techniques to get high domain authority score.
What You Will Learn
- What Is Domain Authority (DA)?
- How to Check Domain Authority Score?
- What Is A Good Domain Authority Score?
- How Is Domain Authority Score Calculated?
- 8-Step Formula for Increasing Your Domain Authority
- What Is Page Authority (PA) and How to Increase Page Authority?
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What Is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (DA) is the most relevant metric to measure your site’s SEO parameter.
Domain Authority was introduced by Moz in which every website gets a score out of 100 which indicates the SEO value of the site.
The higher is the DA of your website, the higher is its rank in the search engines.
It is the true measure of your SEO efforts.
DA score is helpful in comparing your site with your competitors. If your DA score is more than your competitors, you are likely to get a higher rank on the search engine result pages.
How To Check Domain Authority Score?
Since domain authority is a direct product of Moz, you should find your domain authority score from the official site of Moz – Moz Open Site Explorer.
Just type in your site’s URL and it will show your domain authority score and page authority score along with inbound links.
But it could be inconvenient to check the domain authority of your competitors or sites of your choice by typing in the URL every single time.
Instead, we recommend you to use Toolbar from Moz named MozBar which is more like a browser extension.
You can keep a check on yours and your competitor sites’ DA and PA regularly.
What Is A Good Domain Authority Score?
Anything below 50 is an indication that you do not have a good authority on your site.
Anything above 50 and below 60 is an indication that you are a rising star in the search engines. It shows you are getting a good grip on your site’s authority. This score is achievable with long term SEO efforts.
A score in between 60 and 75 shows that you are in the big league competing with the leading players to take their spot in the search engines.
A score above 75 shows you are one of the leading players in your niche.
The score is in logarithmic value which means you can quickly improve from a score of 1 to 50. The higher you go, the slower will be the improvement.
How Is Domain Authority Score Calculated?
There are more than 40 factors that are taken into account to give a DA score to a website.
The following are the most significant factors that carry huge weightage for determining DA score.
Linking Root Domains – Root domains are the backlinks you receive from external websites.
Note that if you receive multiple backlinks from the same website, it will be considered as one root domain.
Therefore, you should try to get quality backlinks from as many different websites as possible to boost your domain authority.
MozRank – MozRank is a measurement of the quality of your external links.
The better the quality of external links, the higher will be the MozRank on a scale of 0-10 and the higher will be the DA score.
Therefore, one of the principles of SEO is to prefer quality over quantity which means that you should focus on getting high quality backlinks from popular sites rather than getting hundreds of external links from not so popular sites.
MozTrust – MozTrust is very much like MozRank but it is more specific as it focuses on giving a score from zero to ten based on how many trusted external links you have.
Trusted external links refer to backlinks from .gov and .edu sites.
It is really difficult to get backlinks from such sites but there are many services available in marketplaces like Fiverr from where you can get them easily.
“Apart from these three factors, other important factors are the quality of your content, social signals, domain name, theme of the site, internal link and link building, on-page SEO, keyword density, user and search engine friendliness and readability of the contents which we have discussed below elaborately.”
8-Step Formula for Increasing Your Domain Authority
Step 1 – Choose Your Domain Name Wisely
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Your chosen domain name plays an important role in determining domain authority score, after all, the score is a measure of your domain name’s rank on search engine.
A good domain name for getting a better domain authority score should ideally have keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche.
For example, our domain name is eMoneyIndeed and we are primarily focused on illustrating online money making opportunities.
The keyword ‘eMoney’ or ‘Money’ is included in it. Plus, eMoneyIndeed contains meaning words which are easy to remember for the visitors and this is a determining factor for DA score.
So, choose a domain name wisely and make it memorable and easy to pronounce.
Another important point for better DA score is to make sure that your domain name is not expiring anytime soon.
If your domain name is going to expire soon, the search engine bots do not consider your site trustworthy.
Hence, if your domain name is about to expire in a year’s time, kindly renew for at least 5 years to be in the good book of DA determining factors.
Step 2 – Make Your Website Professional
To get high DA score, the design of the blog/website plays an important part.
The site must be user-friendly both in terms of functions and navigation.
It must have faster loading time and must be responsive.
It must be any device friendly as a huge chunk of web traffic comes through smartphones and tablets.
The site must have a sitemap and proper 404 pages.
Your website design must promote you as a brand with a proper logo, professional banners and perfect color combination.
Step 3 – Pay Huge Attention to On-Page SEO
Your quality content will go unappreciated if you do not put efforts in SEO works.
On-Page SEO optimization includes the following –
- Catchy and Keyword Rich Title – Your article’s title will sell your content like hot cakes. It must not be a click-bait rather make it catchy with a perfect combination of focus keywords and action words.
- Heading Tags – Your entire article must have multiple sub-headings.
It makes the article interesting to read and you must use H1 to H6 heading tags for sub-headings and important notes.
After every 300 words or less, there should be a heading tag.
- Targeted Keywords – Before writing any article, you must find the list the keywords that your article is going to cover.
The list of keywords must have segregation like following –
- Focus Keywords that must be present in the first paragraph and some of them in the title and sub-headings.
- Prime Keyword (topic of the article) that should be the heart of the article and must be sprinkled across the articles, title, and sub-headings.
- General keywords that are relevant to the article and must be present all across the articles in sub-headings, bullet points and content as a whole.
- Keyword Density – Keyword stuffing happens when you put too many keywords in one sentence.
Generally, bloggers make a mistake of writing a blog title which is full of keywords. Even consecutive sentences are full of selected keywords.
This practice must be completely abolished because it leads to low domain authority and page rank.
Try to keep the density of a keyword in between 1% to 2%.
- Meta Description – Meta description is the text that appears below the title when an article gets listed on search engine result page.
Many bloggers ignore it because if no meta description is there for an article, the first few lines of the first paragraph of the post are automatically considered for meta description.
It is better to specify meta description explicitly and search engine bots use it for ranking purpose.
It must contain the focus keywords and has a maximum of 150 letters.
Make it intriguing and catchy.
- On-Page Optimization Of Content – There are few things you have to keep in mind while writing content.
You should use active voice most of the time.
Do not make the sentences too long. Do not write in long paragraphs as it becomes difficult and boring to read.
Use examples and case studies with facts and images to illustrate points more firmly.
Use simple and non-repeated words and phrases and keep a fixed standard font for writing all articles.
Step 4 – Write High Quality Content and Epic Content
For any site, content is one of the most important determining factors for its overall success.
The quality of the content must be top-notch to get high domain authority score.
Writing quality content requires proper planning and better presentation.
Content has to be user-friendly in terms of readability and quality information provided.
It has to be unique, free from grammar and spelling mistakes, interesting and appealing and more than 500 words at least.
Writing epic content can help in getting high domain authority score as writing epic content takes a lot of time and it is generally an all-around article.
“Epic content refers to a long content of more than 2000 words with a clear flow of thoughts and graphics like infographics, videos, relevant images and other graphical illustrations. An epic content makes sure that a visitor does not have to go to any other site to read similar content on any other site.”
Your article should always be plagiarism free and should be related to your niche.
Step 5 – Image Optimization and Permalink Structure
- Mandatory Image Optimization – Just like in page ranking, image optimization plays an important role in determining domain authority.
Always use the chosen keywords to write the alternate (Alt) text of every image you use for your post.
Use the optimal size for the images and do not upload very large sized image unnecessarily.
Always compress your image using free Smart JPEG and PNG compression tools TinyJPG.com and TinyPNG.com before uploading.
Try to use screenshots and relevant images and even better could be the use of infographics and videos.
- Effective Permalink Structure – The permalink structure of a website must be short and should contain focus keywords.
Permalink should not contain date and time.
Some people prefer to use the category’s name but it is not good when your categories have long names.
The best permalink structure is to customize it according to the post and include the focus keywords and other meaningful words.
For example – http://example.com/postname.
Post name can have 6-7 words separated by dashes. Do not use stop words like axillary verbs and articles unless appropriate.
Never change your permalink once an article is published.
Step 6 – Internal Linking and Remove Bad Links
- Make Linkable Content – Your content should have the scope to relate to other already published old articles in your blog.
For example, you can check any article on Wikipedia; you will understand how strong their internal linking is.
You should always plan beforehand to link to other articles. You can mention a few already published old posts that are relevant to the current article or paragraph.
There should be at least two to four links to old posts per article. This leads to passage of link juice (positive ranking factor) from new posts to old posts.
Creating linkable content is vital for getting a high DA score.
This will decrease the bounce rate as well.
Internal linking makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl and index your site in the best possible way.
- Disavow Toxic Links – There will be some links from very low-quality sites that would point to your site. Those links are bad or toxic links and they bring your domain authority score down and your site will become a spam site.
You should check for such links occasionally from your link profile and disavow them. Google Disavow Tool helps to get rid of toxic links.
Step 7 – Social Signals for High Domain Authority
Social media sites are a deciding factor to improve your DA score.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have DA score of perfect 100.
Hence, they are a vital stepping stone in today’s scenario.
On social media platforms, you must have a complete business page and you need to gain popularity slowly and steadily.
You should represent yourself as a brand and social media should become a good enough source of web traffic for every article.
The engagements of your social media pages help to increase your DA score.
You should definitely have social media share button perfectly placed on your website.
You can also use social media ad campaigns to drive traffic to your posts.
Step 8 – More About Off-Page SEO Techniques
We have already discussed the high importance of external links in getting high DA score.
There are a few other things you must keep in mind while getting external links. Try to get backlinks from websites of different geo-location and domain name extensions.
You should also try to fetch a handful of high quality links from interconnected niche websites rather than all from the same niche.
- Guest Posting – You cannot get high-quality backlinks for popular blogs in your niche unless you do some guest posting.
You should take time to go for guest blogging for selected blogs with keyword rich content.
It will add to your online brand image as well. Almost all popular sites have a provision for guesting posting.
- Blog Commenting – Blog commenting is another way to get quality backlinks from high-quality sites that are relevant to your niche.
Read the article completely before making a comment and the comment should add more to what has already been said in the article.
It can be a set of relevant questions, personal experience on the topic or further points on the topic.
Additional Step – Domain Age Factor
This additional step requires you to be patient and perform the above steps rigorously. With age, your domain authority score is sure to get better.
Domain age factor states that the older your domain gets, the higher will be your domain authority.
So, it is only a matter of time before you get a good DA score. Some domain age checker tools are SmallSEOTools, DomainTools, WebConfs and SeoReviewTools.
What Is Page Authority (PA) and How to Increase Page Authority?
Page authority is a metric to determine the SEO value of any particular page on your website. The higher the value of PA, the higher will be its rank on search engine result pages.
Page Authority Vs Domain Authority
Domain Authority is a measure of your entire domain name and its ranking on search engines while Page Authority is more specific and predicts the ranking strength of individual page or post.
Your DA score is a collective resultant of PA and other factors already discussed above.
“It can so happen that you have a high DA courtesy backlinks, social media presence, site design and SEO efforts but you can have an average PA score because your contents are short, lack backlink and less of on-page SEO efforts.”
How to Increase Page Authority?
Any Page Authority is a direct consequence of individual pages; you need to write SEO-friendly and high-quality content.
Basically, you have to follow Step 3 – 7 of domain authority mentioned above.
You should update your old contents occasionally by adding more information and images.
You should drive traffic from social media page and pay extreme attention to on-page SEO.
Wrapping It Up
- Buy an SEO-friendly and easy to remember domain name. Register it for at least 5 years.
- Your website must be professional yet user-friendly in design. It must promote you as a brand.
- Plan your keywords before writing and stick to effective on-page SEO principles for every post.
- Write quality informative content regularly and epic content once in a while.
- Pay attention to image optimization and creating SEO friendly permalink structure.
- Create linking content with at least 2-4 internal links and remove toxic links occasionally.
- Make the presence felt of your social media pages and drive web traffic and engage followers.
- Put continuous efforts for external link building by guest posting and blog commenting. Always prefer quality links over quantity.
Domain Authority, just like Page Rank, will not increase overnight and you need to be patient. The fruits of hard labor and long patience are the sweetest.
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