Domain Authority (DA) is a website metric developed by Moz. It is one of the most important numbers known to SEOs. The greater your DA, the more likely you are to have strong traffic and high rank.
Key facts about Domain Authority
- Domain authority is based on a lot of factors. Primarily, however, these are link profile factors such as how many backward links are pointing to your website and how authoritative those sites are.
- It is very difficult to gain a DA number of 100. Sites like Facebook and Google have it, so don’t be disappointed if you never hit 100.
- DA is difficult to influence directly. You can’t change your DA score like you can change your meta tags.
5 Tips To Improve Your Website DA
#1: Ensure that your technical SEO is in place
Attending to all the technical aspects of SEO is absolutely important as a foundation. It may not be sexy to optimize your robots.txt or map out a URL structure, but without these important features, you won’t have effective SEO. First things first. Technical SEO comprises the core of a DA-improvement effort.
As Moz explains, to improve your DA, you need to improve your overall SEO, and that includes all the details that SEOs know and love — site structure, navigability, breadcrumbs, URL structure, meta tags, header tags, word count, keywords, alt tags, etc. SEO and content marketing require one another. They actually go together.
Make sure that your SEO is up to par before you go further in the pursuit of higher DA.
#2: Create lots of linkable content
Now, we get into something that has a more direct impact on DA — your content.
In order to have content marketing, you have to have lots and lots of linkable content. What I do is create articles or infographics nearly every day. That’s a lot of output, considering my articles are over 1,000 words, my infographics are big, and my guides exceed 10,000 words.
This is a heck of a lot of content, but I’ve seen it pay off in big ways. Content drives my business. It forms the core of what I do. I would not have the level of success that I now enjoy were it not for the hard work of producing lots and lots of content.
It’s not mere content alone that drives links, of course. It’s top-notch content with power, authority, and value. There is no industry so boring that it couldn’t produce engaging content. My resource on content marketing will explain how you can do this.
#3: Develop strong internal linking
Often overlooked in the craze over “high quality backlinks” is the building of high quality internal backlinks. I can’t overemphasize the importance of internal linking. (See what I did there? That’s an internal link.)
Internal linking weaves a powerful network within your site that benefits both the user and the search engines that crawl and index your site. A site that lacks internal linking is like a collection of pebbles — disconnected and weak. But a site that has strong internal linking turns those pebbles into concrete — interconnected and unbreakable.
The great thing about having more content is that you’ll have more content to link to. And the more you link internally, the greater your ability to create a dense and powerful site network will be.
#4: Regularly remove toxic backlinks
SEO isn’t all glory and grandeur. There’s the nitty-gritty of wading through spreadsheets and performing mind-numbing repetitive work.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. You’ve got to remove your toxic backlinks. Every now and then, you should dig into your link profile, find the spammy links, and get rid of them.
You’ll gain a huge competitive advantage by regularly cleaning your link profile. In my experience, this isn’t something that most webmasters are doing with any regularity. Sure, I see webmasters engage in clean-up with a vengeance, but it’s only after they’ve experienced the slump of an algorithm penalty or the heart-stopping experience of a manual penalty.
Don’t wait till a penalty strikes you to clean up your link profile. Do it now and then continue to do it on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.
#5: Be patient
If you are doing exactly what I’ve explained in the above steps, your DA will rise. One of the factors that don’t get a lot of notice in discussions of higher DA is the domain age factor.
Generally speaking, the older the domain, the higher its authority. I examined the link profile of a website and discovered some historic domains. These historic domains had high DA levels.
To find out the age of a domain, you can use the free Domain Age Tool provided by Webconfs.com.
Domain age doesn’t automatically translate into domain authority, however. If the domain falls into disrepair, maintains outdated SEO techniques, lacks fresh content, or builds up a cruddy link profile, it will lose its DA.
As you pursue content marketing, you will gradually see your DA rise. My point is that it takes time. Be patient. SEO wins don’t happen in a day. They happen over the long haul.
Source: Quicksprout