How to Increase Website Domain Authority?

A few years ago while I just started blogging, I had no clue about domain authority and its effects on ranking.

I just wrote my content so far I have the inspiration too.

But then, along the way, I came to the knowledge of what domain authority is and its factor in ranking.

As a beginner, you may or may not have come across the term ‘domain authority.

In this article, I will put you through what domain authority is, how it is calculated and how to increase website domain authority.

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Let’s proceed.

What is domain authority?

There are several factors Google puts into consideration for a website to rank on search engines.

Some of them are,

1. Domain Authority
2. Website Speed
3. Quality content
4. Backlinks etc.

Domain rating or authority is a part of this factor.

Domain authority is the metric by Moz, it determines the overall power/authority of a website.

This means the higher your domain authority, the higher your chances to rank on search engine results.

An increase in search engine rankings leads to an increase in traffic.

An increase in traffic leads to an increase in sales.

But this is not what we are focused on today, our directives are focused on how to increase a website domain authority.

The whole idea of ranking a domain based on authority came from an idea by Larry Page (Google’s co-founder).

Rankings on a search engine do not really depend on the domain authority of that site.

This is because DA is an idea developed by Moz and their data is not as accurate as what Google knows about your site.

Moz put 20+ factors into consideration while measuring domain authority, while Google looks at over 100+ factors.

What is Page Authority?

Page Authority is kind of similar to domain authority but the difference is that page authority is specific to a particular page while DA deals with the entire website.

Page authority indicates the authority of a particular page and how well it will rank on search engines.

Nevertheless, a website with a high Page authority will similarly have high domain authority.

Page Authority vs Domain Authority!

Page authority has a few similarities with domain authority.

The difference is that Page authority is the power/authority of a specific page on a website.

While domain authority is the power/authority of the whole website.

They are both rated on a scale of 1-100.

How is domain authority calculated?

Several factors are used in giving a total wrap-up of a site’s DA and they include,

1. The number of referral links pointing to your site.
2. Quality and relevance of the referral links.
3. Quality of your content.
4. How popular your domain is on social media.
5. Your site’s SEO.

How do I find out the domain authority of my site?

Thankfully, there are several tools you can use to find out the domain authority of your site and they include:

1. Moz.com
2. Ahref.com
3. SEMrush.com
4. FindMyTricks.in

To find out the domain authority score of your website, simply visit any of these tools, and click on Site Explorer to type in your domain name.

Kindly wait for a few seconds as your result is being processed.

What is a good domain authority score?

After you must have checked your domain authority using the tools I listed above, you might be wondering if the score displayed is good enough.

As I stated earlier, domain authority is rated from 1 to 100.

However, every website you see online that has a very high DA started at one, and the more popularity and quality backlinks they gained, the higher their domain authority.

A strong gauge for your DA is to measure it against your direct competitors.

A good domain score is dependent on the domain authority score of your domain competitors.

For example, your competitor has a domain authority of 40 and you have a domain authority of 56, this means yours is excellent.

To effectively determine whether your DA is good or not, compare it with your direct competitors.

If it is higher, it means you are doing great, if it is lower, it means you have a lot of work to do.

7 Steps to Increase Website Domain Authority

Several measures can be taken to increase the domain authority of your blog and they include:

1. Focus on link building

Link building is the most important metric you should be focused on when it comes to increasing domain authority.

Because if big brands and authority sites are linking to you google notices it and it signals to them,

that you have something valuable and quality to offer, so you can be trusted.

To check the link profile of your site, visit any of the tools I listed earlier.

Check how many links you have, check the referring domains and their authority score.

A domain with a DA of 50 is good, similarly, a domain with a DA of 70+ is considered outstanding.

Often, beginners find it very difficult to understand link building and how to go about it.

To give you an overview of the process, there are three ways to build quality links

Naturally

This process however takes time, but it is worth it at the end of the day.

To build a link naturally means you create top-notch quality content, someone finds the article useful, links to it in one of their articles.

For this idea to work, it is important that you create content that is easy to read, insightful and informative.

However, you must understand that the entire process takes time and patience.

This is because it will take time to accumulate a tangible number of readers to read your article and link back to it.

Outreach method

The second way to build a link is to use the outreach method.

This process involves reaching out to other webmasters letting them know your blog exists.

And also giving them reasons to link to your blog and what they stand to gain if they link to your blog.

Guest posting

By guest posting, I mean writing content for a highly authoritative site with the hope of getting a do-follow backlink in exchange.

2. Disavow any toxic/harmful backlink

Toxic/harmful backlinks are gotten through backdoor methods.

This is known as the spammy link and it can earn you a penalty from Google, hence, knocking down your domain authority score.

To check for toxic links, click on semrush, navigate to the backlink audit section, click on it.

SEMrush will display all the toxic links you have, the referring domains, and the total ratio of positive to toxic links.

Now, a way to disavow this link is to remove them manually.

For example, visit sites where you dropped your link in their comment section and remove it.

However, if you can’t have access to this site, the best thing to do is to use Google disavow to remove them.

3. Create top-notch content

Bill gate said and I quote ‘content is king’.

For you to be able to deliver a message successfully with great impact, your content must be top-notch.

Quality content attracts links, a lot of people would want to link back to your content.

The better your content is, the more traction it gets from site owners.

Basically, it means you have to create contents that are relevant to your brand.

4. Work on your on-page SEO

To build the domain authority of a website, you need to work on your on-page SEO practice.

On-page SEO has to do with optimizing your content so that it becomes visible on search engine results.

To optimize your on-page SEO, there are certain things you should put in place, they include

1. Optimize your title tags and description.
2. Wrap up subheadings in h1, h2, h3, tags.
3. Include your targeted keywords in your URL.
4. Add keywords to the alt description of your images and videos.
5. Use keywords naturally in your content.
6. Add internal links to your content.

5. Work on your technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to improving the technical aspect of your website so that it can be easily indexed and crawled by search engines.

If the technical aspect of your site is done wrong, it is going to have a huge impact on your domain authority and rankings.

There are certain things you need to put in place so that your website can be indexed and crawled.

And they include,

1. Sign up and register with the Google search console.
2. Submit your site to webmaster tools.
3. Create and submit your XML sitemap to the search console.
4. Move your site from HTTP to HTTPS.
5. Check your robot.txt file.

You can do complete technical SEO using Semrush. This is what I use for full SEO.

6. Improve your page speed

Page speed is a crucial factor when it comes to ranking on Google.

Users leave a site that takes time to load, hence you need to work on your site’s load speed.

A better page speed equals a good user experience.

To improve your page load speed,

1. Switch from a shared host to a cloud host (Cloudways).
2. Select a speedy and optimized theme (Themify Ultra).
3. Connect Cloudflare CDN.
4. Use cache plugins like Autoptimize.

Google officially confirms that website loading speed is one of the ranking factors.

When I switch from a shared host (Siteground) to a Cloud host (Cloudways), my website’s loading speed changes from 5 sec to under 1 sec.

Also, the ranking of my articles improved within a month.

7. Boost your social media presence

Finally, on how to increase website domain authority, you need to increase your social media signals.

Google, however, stated that social media signals are not a part of their ranking factor.

Nevertheless, pages with high rankings on Google get high social signals, they have many likes, shares, tweets, and pins.

To build your social media presence

1. Create a Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Twitter, and Pinterest business page and work on increasing active followers.
2. Add a social media share button to your blog to make it easier for users to share your content on social media.
3. You can also create groups on Facebook and Pinterest so that your post gets traction when shared.

How long does it take to build a Domain Authority?

How long it takes to build a domain authority depends on the practical steps and measures you put into building links.

Improving your DA might take a few months or years, let’s say a minimum of 2 or 3.

For those that will go for the natural link-building method, it might take months or years to build something tangible.

While for those with the outreach and networking method, it might take 1-6 months.

However, there are other backlink building methods you can adopt like, dropping your URL in the comment section of a high DA website, dropping links in the forum, backlink exchange, and backlink purchase.

While these look like a means to an end, they can be outrightly dangerous to your site.

Because Google might flag down your site because of the black hat SEO method you adopted.

Meanwhile, the best method I recommend for building links has been stated above.

Follow the rules and you are good to go, not following can earn you a penalty.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, don’t be so engrossed in your domain authority that you forget to do the needful.

Create valuable content, work on your on-page and technical SEO, build your social media following, and most importantly, build links.

As I stated earlier, increasing a website’s domain authority requires time and enough patience.

Having a low DA does not mean poor performance on Google.

However, having a high DA does not also signify that you will get better rankings.

The best thing to do is to build your brand, gain relevance and dominance in your niche and all of this will come naturally to you.

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