Domain Authority
In this post, I will explain what Domain Authority (DA) is, why it matters, how you can determine the DA of your website, and how to improve it.
Domain Authority is a score out of 100 on a logarithmic scale that is used by Moz.com to predict how well your website will perform in search engine rankings. Because it’s logarithmic, it’s a lot easier to improve your score from 20 to 30 than it is from 50 to 60. It is calculated using over 40 indicators, including Mozscape web index, link counts, MozRank and Moztrust scores, and dozens more.
By having a higher domain authority than your competitors, means that your site is more likely to rank higher in search engines. Unlike a lot of SEO tactics, this requires more than just writing great content and waiting for the number to increase.
To check your domain authority, enter your website at moonsy, seoreviewtools, or the authority, moz.com’s open site explorer.
Perhaps the biggest thing you can do to improve your DA, is to review the websites that link to you.To get a list of backlinks, you can obtain a list from Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer or dozens of other backlink checking tools.
To improve your DA need to get rid of the bad links, and improve the good links, like I mentioned in PageRank. Getting rid of bad links is done by either requesting the removal of the links, or disavowing them. To improve the good links, you can either hire writers/content authors at high ranking sites to link to you, or typically hire an SEO agency to do this for you, as they would already have these relationships well established. If you have more time than budget, than you need to focus on your content marketing — everything on your website should be written so well, people would want to link to your articles.
If you don’t think an article you’re writing is interesting enough that multiple influential people/websites would want to tell their friends by linking to it, don’t write it. A few other tricks to creating linkable content, are infographics, and funny, interesting and/or informative videos. Things that you would want to share on social media, are examples of linkable content.When creating linkable content, also ensure it is related to the topic you want to be the domain authority on. If you’re business is related to cute kittens, improving your DA is going to be easy!
The final thing is to remember in every article you publish, is to do internal linking as well. For example, the PageRank article link above, it links to another article on this same website — that is an internal link. This is useful not only to readers who want more information, but to the search engine spiders that crawl through your website.