The ability of being able to improve Domain Authority of your website is an important factor for higher ranking, which in return means bigger organic traffic.
The rating for Domain Authority is between the scale of 0 to 100, with the aim of predicting how well a website will perform in terms of ranking in the search engine results.
There are great tools that marketers can use to calculate their score across Domain Authority, Website Authority, Authority Score and Trust Flow Score.
Understanding Domain Authority
It is vital to know that sometimes the Domain Authority of a website can be low, but can have high ranking on Google.
Domain Authority (DA) is made of other key factors one should consider such as:
- DA is mainly used for domain comparison purposes and not for SEO evaluation as such
- DA change cannot be seen immediately as it needs time for performance to show
- DA takes into consideration around 40 factors whereas Google considers more than 200 factors approximately
- One can improve the DA when it is at low levels, let’s say between the range of 20 to 30, but difficult to improve a range of 70 to 80
- DA measurements does not take into consideration any penalties or other relevant parameters imposed by Google
Domain Authority calculations involves a wide spectrum of elements including the following:
- Website’s content quality
- The quality of all incoming links to your website, and their relevance
- The SEO performance of a website
- The number of incoming links to one’s website
You can calculate your domain’s authority by using a well-known DA measurement tool Moz.
Alternatively, there is also the parameter of Page Authority (PA) which is similar to DA with the difference that PA calculates and focuses on a particular page of choice.
Improve DA of your website
A. On-Page Optimization (SEO)
This factor comes in hand exclusively with your website’s content and optimization. You can also refer to one of our previous articles related to WordPress on-page SEO (view point C).
In general though, in regards to other CMS systems, excluding WordPress, on-page SEO includes some of the following key criteria:
- Using keywords within your pages and / or articles content
- Optimizing your media content, such as images, videos, etc.
- Proper titles and meta descriptions
- Proper heading tags
- Internal and outbound links
B. Technical SEO for improving Domain Authority
Many people may not pay too much attention on this factor, but it is an important one especially if you manage to do it right at the early stages.
Technical SEO considers mainly technicalities, the “hidden” items let’s say, such as the Google Search Console and other similar platforms where technical SEO takes place.
Therefore, the Technical SEO must include the following items:
- The SSL certificate, which is the https mode within your domain name
- Registering to Google Search Console and verifying your domain name, creating and submitting your Sitemap (you can also refer our previous article on how to create a sitemap, by looking at point E)
- Checking the settings of your robots.txt file
- Setting a proper breadcrumb menu (navigation friendliness so that the users have less steps to take while navigating one’s site)
- In the condition that you have a multilingual website, make sure that you are using hreflang correctly
C. Off-Page Optimization (SEO)
With off-page optimization is important to have a clean, clear and strong profile.
What do we therefore mean by “strong profile”? How to improve Domain Authority of a website with such profile?
A strong profile is one that has quality links from high authority sites, links from unique domains, incoming links from related websites within the same field, and no bad links (low quality).
Bad links can be of different types such as participating in paid exchange links schemes, purchasing links from various websites, selling links, bulk link building with robots, and other negative setups.
In addition, another approach to devalue bad links, is the use of the “nofollow” tag. This tag informs the search engines to totally ignore the selected links which includes this tag.
An example of such link including this tag could be: <a href=”https://www.yourdomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>This is a nofollow link </a>
You can also view the links associated to your website and act accordingly in the Google Search console by visiting the links section. View the image below for better understanding.
In the scenario that the above approach is not working, you should then use with caution the Disavow method by Google.
On the other hand, apart from aiming to reduce the so called “negativities” from your website, you can also aim to improve your site by performing a natural link building and blogger outreach.
Natural link building is one where users and audiences across the net, find your website, are interested in your content and therefore link their website to yours.
The blogger outreach is an attempt in reaching existing websites, directories and blogs, letting them know that you exist and that you can offer valuable content.
D. Mobile responsiveness and friendliness
Paying attention to your website’s mobile setup is extremely important. The majority of the users nowadays access websites via their mobiles.
Mobile friendliness is a ranking factor as you already know by now for Google’s search engines. If you wish to test your website’s mobile responsiveness you may use this superb tool.
E. Page speed
Improving your page speed is another critical and vital factor for optimization purposes, and for your users mainly.
A low speed website will negatively influence your users’ experience, whereas high speed will encourage your users to visit your site over and over again, especially if you also have quality content to show.
You can also refer to one of our articles mentioning the importance of evaluating website speed, as well as how to improve speed by looking at an additional article of ours on how to improve SEO score, which includes the topic of page speed too.
F. Social Media presence
Even though there has been no clear clue that social media is strongly considered within Google’s algorithm, we have seen in many cases that website shares, likes, follows, and tweets have a huge impact to one’s site awareness and recognition.
Therefore ensure that you have nice and attractive social media pages that can help your website’s reputation and sharing attempts.
G. Patience is MUST for improving Domain Authority
Improving your Domain Authority is not an act that can bring results within a day. You have to be patient enough, work regularly to improve you website.
Moreover, you should now feel more comfortable on the subject of “How to improve Domain Authority of your website.”
