The early days of SEO were less difficult. Nowadays, it’s hard to rank on search engines if you don’t have a clue about the most important factors that have the most effect on your ranking.
Today, we are talking about one of the most important search engines ranking factors, which is called DA or domain authority. In our detailed guide, you will learn everything you need to know about your DA factor and its importance.
Introduction to Domain Authority
Domain authority, a metric similar to PageRank, was created by Moz. DA was created to rate websites on a scale of 1-100. 1 is the least desirable score and 100 is the best. In general, the higher your domain authority, the higher your ranking in search engines. Domain authority consists of 30+ ranking signals, such as number of backlinks, quality of backlinks, number of referring domains, Moz rank, Moz trust, page authority, etc.
Not sure about these terms? Read: The Complete Glossary of SEO
To check your domain authority use Moz’s free open site explorer.
How to Increase Domain Authority
Let me reiterate: the higher your domain authority, the higher your ranking in search engines. This means that high domain authority improves your search engine rankings as well. Domain authority tells us how competitive a website is in the search engines. As a webmaster, you should care about your domain authority and be interested in increasing your DA and getting links from websites with high DA. Here, I’m sharing with you a full guide that will help you improve your domain authority.
Domain Age and Time of Expiration
Domain age and time of expiration are important signals which affect your DA. I would strongly recommend that you buy an existing domain name. Paying a few dollars to extend your domain name for the next 3-4 years would be helpful too in the long run. This tells Google that you are serious about your site, and you’re not just playing around.
Get More High-Quality Backlinks to Your Site
This is the most important factor that will affect your DA score the most. Get as many high-quality backlinks as you can and make sure they are coming from high quality, trusted sites. Avoid buying backlinks or exchanging them because this is going to harm your site.
More Referring Domains to Your Site!
There is an old SEO rule and it says that 50 links from 50 different websites are better than 100 links from one website. Why? Because referring domains count as well. The number of referring domains affects your DA score. Get links from various geo-locations and varied domains. Make sure these links are coming from high-quality websites that are relevant to your niche.
Internal Links Structure
This is probably the easiest factor that you can control. For a good link structure example, look at the Wikipedia site and notice how powerful their internal links are. Have at least three internal links on each of your pages. Go back and edit your posts and add more links relevant to other content already on your site. Also note: old pages pass DA score to new pages.
Bad Links Removal
While you are creating new backlinks, keep an eye out for bad links that point to your site. Bad links are links from spammy or low-quality websites, low-quality social bookmarking sites and links from websites that are not relevant to your niche as well. You can use the Google Disavow tool to tell Google to ignore these links.
Become a Trustful and Authority Source in Your Niche
Publishing 1-3 high-quality articles per week is much better than publishing 10 medium quality articles. Here, quality is more important than quantity. Become a trustful site, news breaker or an authoritative source in your niche. Google says content is king, so write high-quality articles to keep Google happy. If you do, your DA score will also improve over the time.
On page SEO
Optimize your site for search engines. Have a sitemap, no index tags and categories pages. Use meta titles, meta descriptions use heading tags in all articles. Make sure you also write unique titles and descriptions for each page.
Related posts:
Speed Up Your Site
Google is giving great importance to loading time this year, as they said that loading time is an official ranking factor in 2015. Therefore, optimize your site speed to make your site load in less than three seconds. If your website takes more than three seconds to load, you really need to start working on your site speed right away. Use a speedy hosting service and optimize your images. If your website is on WordPress self-hosting software, use a cache plugin to improve your website speed.
Also, use a CDN to serve your content. Here’s a post about the top three CDN services
Social Media Branding
Social media engagement has become even more important in 2015. Create a profile for your blog, site or brand on every major social media platform. In addition, make sure that your readers are sharing your content on Facebook, Twitter and other major social media sites.
Read:
- 8 Of the Best Social Media Tools to Build Your Brand
- Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions For 2015
- How to Rank Better In Pinterest Search
Conclusion:
Two years ago, Google PageRank was the most important search engines ranking factor for any website on the internet. But now, PageRank is no longer as significant.
So, if you have never checked your domain authority score, you should make a point of doing so as soon as you are finished reading this article. It’s time to start working on improving your domain authority for better ranking results.
Have any questions? Please feel free to ask me via comments. Also, don’t forget to share this guide with your friends and others in your social networking sites.
Related: Search engine optimization (SEO) – everything you should know about SEO
About the Author
My name is Eslam Yosef, the Founder of Jumzle. I write about blogging, marketing and SEO with a vision of sharing knowledge and helping you to be your best. Check out my first post on Jumzle. I think you’ll find it useful, since I have 150 unique daily visitors because of it. Have any questions? Feel free to ask via the comments section.
Moz updates DA and PA every month, 2 months maximum. The next update will be on 21 April with the upcoming Google update for mobiles.
Once again you shared an outstanding post. These days I was very worried about my blog DA, but now I will focus on good quality links for good domain authority. Thanks!
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You’re very welcome, Rahul! Glad you found it helpful. 🙂