Having your website stand out in a sea of 2 billion websites can be a daunting task.
On any random day, more than 3 million blog posts are uploaded online – with an increase in the number of blogs vying for internet users’ attention.
These stats paint the picture of highly-competitive space for bloggers, webmasters, internet marketers, and site owners.
What do you need to get done to make your site stand out? What are you doing that is preventing your site from getting the required visibility? As always, the answer boils down to the right information and using it rightly.
Google helps to solve the problem of your site’s visibility, partly. Google uses its proprietary Page Rank to organize web pages in order of their relevance to particular keywords. Although details used in ranking websites and pages aren’t publicly known, there are tools and techniques used to predict a site’s ranking on Google.
One of the best-known techniques available to you is the Domain Authority.
What is your role in all of these? You need a basic understanding of how Domain Authority works, how it impacts your site, and how you can improve on it.
This post provides a comprehensive guide on the topic of Domain Authority, and all you need to know about it.
The main topics covered in this Domain Authority tutorial include:
- An Intro to the Concept of Domain Authority
- How is Your Site’s Domain Authority Measured?
- Why Domain Authority is an Important Metric
- What You Need to Do to Improve Your Site’s Domain Authority
- Factors That Influence Changes in Domain Authority
- Conclusion
An Intro to the Concept of Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a business analytic tool designed to predict a website’s ranking on SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). Moz is the company behind the creation of DA, which makes use of proprietary metrics to determine the domain authority of your web page.
The domain authority of your website is ranked based on probability with the lowest being 0, and highest ranking being 100. As the domain authority of your website improves, your ranking increases to a higher number.
For instance, a web page with a DA score of 50 for the keyword “SEO backlinks” can be raised to 55. This reflects an improvement in its Domain Authority. Sites can also fall in their DA ranking to a lower score.
It is important to note that Google does not make use of domain authority to determine Page Rank. In fact, Domain Authority isn’t a reflection of how Google ranks your page.
Although domain authority isn’t a ranking factor on Google, it is an important tool for your SEO toolkit.
How is Your Site’s Domain Authority Measured?
Some metrics used by Moz to analyze your site’s domain authority include.
I. Linking of Root Domains – This metric measures the total number of unique backlinks to your site, blog, or online store.
II. The Total Number of Inbound Links – Inbound links are external links from known and unknown sources that point to your site.
For an inbound link to positively impact your site, it has to be one of the sites with high domain authority. All inbound links do not add the same value to your site.
III. The Spam Score – This measures the spam level of the sites that link to your site. Sites that have no domain authority or no relevance to your site’s niche can be considered spammy if in large numbers.
Domain Authority is valuable for building links from authority sites. The DA of sites can be evaluated in reference to the quality of inbound links.
Domain Authority does not reflect the PageRank of your site on Google; it is best used as a prediction of a site’s authority.
Alternative metrics used to quantify sites include Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, SEMRush’s Authority Score, and Majestic SEO’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
Why Domain Authority is an Important Metric
It is noteworthy to state, here again; Domain Authority is not used by Google for its SERP. It is a useful metric for planning an effective SEO strategy for your site.
Domain Authority is important for other reasons below:
1. Domain Authority is the Closest Thing to Google PageRank
This metric gives you the best metric for evaluating your site’s domain authority.
Its updated version uses a dataset of over 35.5 trillion links to detect link manipulation and authority. It gives a more accurate value of your site’s SERP ranking than other tools in its league.
2. Determine the Authority of Inbound Links
Results from analyzing top ranking sites on Google show a common occurrence – a high number of authoritative inbound links. Moz’s Domain Authority equips you with a tool to measure the authority of inbound links.
You can also measure the quality of links in your industry or niche. This info helps in analysis and decision-making.
3. A Tool for Gauging Your Competitors’ Score
You can actually use this tool to spy on your Competitors’ DA gauge. Analyze how well your Competitors rank with respect to some keywords and use your findings for strategic planning.
This can give you a baseline from which you can benchmark the Domain Authority to implement to your site’s advantage.
You can easily find the DA score for any site by installing the MozBar Chrome extension. This extension is available for free.
4. Evaluate The Backlink Profile of Your Site
The backlink profile refers to all of the inbound links (or incoming links) to your site or blog. Domain Authority provides every detail you need for the backlink profile of your site.
Since Domain Authority is a required tool for boosting your site’s search ranking, you should plan to have a copy – that’s if you haven’t included it yet in your SEO toolkit.
Having said this, your focus should remain on the end game – taking all the required measures to improve the domain authority of your site.
What You Need to Do to Improve Your Site’s Domain Authority
1. Get More Individual Pages Ranked
Domain Authority gives a prediction of your site’s search ranking with Google. To help improve on the entire site’s search ranking, you can create different pages to rank for particular keywords of the site. It also improves your chances of gaining more backlinks to the site.
2. Keywords Targeting
Having a higher DA score for your site improves the chance for higher ranking for a keyword. If you can target these keywords that have lower competition and higher chances for search ranking, this provides a big boost to your SEO results.
3. Guest Blogging
Publishing guest posts on blogs and online platforms helps to increase your reach, syndicate your content, and generate quality backlinks.
Do this over time and you’ll have a portfolio of backlinks helping to improve your site’s domain authority.
4. Produce High-Quality Content
An effective content marketing strategy is keenly focused on the creation and distribution of great content. That is the old-fashioned way of building an audience and engaging your readers
High quality may mean different things to different people, but I will attempt a description for the purpose of this post.
High-quality content is a blog post, editorial, or other kinds of write-up that fully satisfies a query. For instance, if I query Google search for “how to make money online”, I’d expect to get millions of search responses. High-quality content will provide a complete answer to the query I made.
It means that content has to be created for humans, and not just for search engines.
Also, high-quality content is compelling, well-researched, and engaging; it contains verifiable facts, and is shareable.
Though not a must, quality content also contains graphic images and infographics to aid reading.
Sites that have quality content usually have returning visitors, social shares, and increased inbound links.
5. Social Shares
Links posted on social media platforms are regarded as “nofollow”. This is a logical way of saying that the links from these sites are not regarded as authority backlinks by Google. If these were not the case, you can be sure that the world wide web would have been spammed with all these links.
So, if social media links do not add to the DA of your site, why share your site’s links on them?
The more places you share your links, the more visible the content is. This improves the potential traffic that is directed to your blog or site.
While more traffic may not lead to more backlinks, it helps to boost your Google Page Rank.
6. Others –
While it is impossible to exhaust this list, you can focus on the important ways to improve the domain authority of your site. There are other methods that qualify as organic in inorganic means of boosting traffic.
You may consider paid search ads, converting the text content of your posts to audiobooks, podcasts, or videos. Make use of ad networks to purchase traffic etc.
Traffic has a correlation with the eventual DA score of your site.
While the DA score is updated from time to time, changes to the overall rankings are minimal; in most cases, the changes are unnoticed.
Here are some factors that influence these changes in the DA score.
Factors That Influence Changes in Domain Authority
In a previous section, we discussed how Domain Authority is measured. A further look into this explains how the DA score for your site is determined, and what influences its change.
Any number of reasons could be behind the change in your DA score.
Since DA score is a metric that lays so much emphasis on backlinks, an update to any of your authority sites can impact your DA score.
Let’s assume that you have a significant amount of backlinks from an authority site! We all know these links provide a positive boost to your site’s DA score. If a major update of the authority site leads to an increase or decrease in its DA score, it transfers that effect to your site.
A Moz upgrade also results in changes to the DA score of some sites. These changes may be very insignificant, or very obvious. This may be caused by a change in the metrics used for determining Domain Authority Score for all sites.
Remember that you have little control over links (inbound or outbound) on your site. A page that you link to may be deleted or the site pulled down. A link could also turn out toxic without your knowledge.
These can lead to marked changes in your DA score.
The moment you notice a drop in your DA score, you should locate the reason for this. Is it an upgrade on Moz, an update on any of your “backlinked” sites, or as a result of a link becoming toxic?
Once you determine the cause, finding a solution becomes much easier.
Conclusion
It is one thing to have a site full of great content, and it’s another to have it stand out among 2 billion live websites.
Google helps to organize the world’s online content, and deliver results that are relevant to search queries. So, Google helps to position your content before internet users after you must have optimized your blog for search results.
Google uses its proprietary PageRank to organize web content in order of relevance to keywords. We might not know the metrics used to determine PageRank, but we have a second close – Domain Authority.
Domain Authority is a metric from Moz that is used to predict the ranking of a website on search engine results pages.
DA does not claim to use the same metrics as Google but helps you evaluate your site ranking based on the quality of backlinks it has.
This guide offers you details on how DA score is measured, what influences it, and ideas to help improve your DA score.
Moz offers a free Chrome extension that you can download and install. This allows you to view the DA score for any sites that you visit.
You can start working on your site’s DA score right now and work it to the very top.
If you follow this guide sheepishly, you can rest assured that you’ll start seeing positive changes in your site’s Domain Authority score.
Have you started a site already? Or do you want to start one now? Well, whether you’ve started long ago or just wanted to get started now, I’d recommend that you enroll for Wealthy Affiliate training. You have all tools and resources at your disposal to run a successful online business with WA.